Blog - Running The Country

May 14, 2013June 21, 2013

Former Pro-GMO Scientist Speaks Out On The Real Dangers of Genetically Engineered Food

Originally Posted
May 6, 2013 by THIERRY VRAIN
PreventDisease.com

I retired 10 years ago after a long career as a research scientist for Agriculture Canada. When I was on the payroll, I was the designated scientist of my institute to address public groups and reassure them that genetically engineered crops and foods were safe. There is, however, a growing body of scientific research – done mostly in Europe, Russia, and other countries – showing that diets containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in laboratory mice and rats.

I don’t know if I was passionate about it but I was knowledgeable. I defended the side of technological advance, of science and progress.

I have in the last 10 years changed my position. I started paying attention to the flow of published studies coming from Europe, some from prestigious labs and published in prestigious scientific journals, that questioned the impact and safety of engineered food.

I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of course that they are safe to eat.

There are a number of scientific studies that have been done for Monsanto by universities in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Most of these studies are concerned with the field performance of the engineered crops, and of course they find GMOs safe for the environment and therefore safe to eat.
Individuals should be encouraged to make their decisions on food safety based on scientific evidence and personal choice, not on emotion or the personal opinions of others.

We should all take these studies seriously and demand that government agencies replicate them rather than rely on studies paid for by the biotech companies.

The Bt corn and soya plants that are now everywhere in our environment are registered as insecticides. But are these insecticidal plants regulated and have their proteins been tested for safety? Not by the federal departments in charge of food safety, not in Canada and not in the U.S.

There are no long-term feeding studies performed in these countries to demonstrate the claims that engineered corn and soya are safe. All we have are scientific studies out of Europe and Russia, showing that rats fed engineered food die prematurely.

These studies show that proteins produced by engineered plants are different than what they should be. Inserting a gene in a genome using this technology can and does result in damaged proteins. The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins.
Genetic engineering is 40 years old. It is based on the naive understanding of the genome based on the One Gene – one protein hypothesis of 70 years ago, that each gene codes for a single protein. The Human Genome project completed in 2002 showed that this hypothesis is wrong.

The whole paradigm of the genetic engineering technology is based on a misunderstanding. Every scientist now learns that any gene can give more than one protein and that inserting a gene anywhere in a plant eventually creates rogue proteins. Some of these proteins are obviously allergenic or toxic.

I have drafted a reply to Paul Horgen’s letter to the Comox Valley Environmental Council. It is my wish that it goes viral as to educate as many people as possible rapidly. Any and all social media is fine by me. This can also be used as a briefing note for the councilors of AVICC or anywhere else. Thank you for your help. [Original source with replies from Dr. Paul Horgen]

Thierry Vrain
Innisfree Farm

I am turning you towards a recent compilation (June 2012) of over 500 government reports and scientific articles published in peer reviewed Journals, some of them with the highest recognition in the world. Like The Lancet in the medical field, or Advances in Food and Nutrition Research, or Biotechnology, or Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, European Journal of Histochemistry, Journal of Proteome Research, etc â€¦ This compilation was made by a genetic engineer in London, and an investigative journalist who summarized the gist of the publications for the lay public.

GMO Myths and Truths – an evidence based examination of the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified crops. A report of 120 pages, it can be downloaded for free from Earth Open Source. “GMO Myths and Truths” disputes the claims of the Biotech industry that GM crops yield better and more nutritious food, that they save on the use of pesticides, have no environmental impact whatsoever and are perfectly safe to eat. Genetic pollution is so prevalent in North and South America where GM crops are grown that the fields of conventional and organic grower are regularly contaminated with engineered pollen and losing certification. The canola and flax export market from Canada to Europe (a few hundreds of millions of dollars) were recently lost because of genetic pollution. Did I mention superweeds, when RoundUp crops pass their genes on to RoundUp Resistant weeds. Apparently over 50% of fields in the USA are now infested and the growers have to go back to use other toxic herbicides such as 2-4 D. Many areas of Ontario and Alberta are also infested. The transgenes are also transferred to soil bacteria. A chinese study published last year shows that an ampicillin resistance transgene was transferred from local engineered crops to soil bacteria, that eventually found their way into the rivers. The transgenes are also transferred to humans. Volunteers who ate engineered soybeans had undigested DNA in their intestine and their bacterial flora was expressing the soybean transgenes in the form of antibiotic resistance. This is genetic pollution to the extreme, particularly when antibiotic resistance is fast becoming a serious global health risk. I can only assume the American Medical Association will soon recognize its poorly informed judgement.

In 2009 the American Academy of Environmental Medicine called for a moratorium of GM foods, safety testing and labeling. Their review of the available literature at the time noted that animals show serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system. Monsanto writes “There is no need to test the safety of GM foods”. So long as the engineered protein is safe, foods from GM crops are substantially equivalent and they cannot pose any health risks.” The US Food and Drug Administration waived all levels of safety testing in 1996 before approving the commercialization of these crops. Nothing more than voluntary research is necessary, and the FDA does not even want to see the results. And there is certainly no need to publish any of it. If you remember 1996, the year that the first crops were commercialized, the research scientists of the US FDA all predicted that transgenic crops would have unpredictable hard to detect side effects, allergens, toxins, nutritional effects, new diseases. That was published in 2004 in Biotechnology if you recall seeing it.

I know well that Canada does not perform long term feeding studies as they do in Europe. The only study I am aware of from Canada is from the Sherbrooke Hospital in 2011, when doctors found that 93% of pregnant women and 82% of the fetuses tested had the protein pesticide in their blood. This is a protein recognized in its many forms as mildly to severely allergenic. There is no information on the role played by rogue proteins created by the process of inserting transgenes in the middle of a genome. But there is a lot of long term feeding studies reporting serious health problems in mice and rats. The results of the first long term feeding studies of lab rats reported last year in Food and Chemical Toxicology show that they developed breast cancer in mid life and showed kidney and liver damage. The current statistic I read is that North Americans are eating 193 lbs of GMO food on average annually. That includes the children I assume, not that I would use that as a scare tactic. But obviously I wrote at length because I think there is cause for alarm and it is my duty to educate the public.

One argument I hear repeatedly is that nobody has been sick or died after a meal (or a trillion meals since 1996) of GM food. Nobody gets ill from smoking a pack of cigarette either. But it sure adds up, and we did not know that in the 1950s before we started our wave of epidemics of cancer. Except this time it is not about a bit of smoke, it’s the whole food system that is of concern. The corporate interest must be subordinated to the public interest, and the policy of substantial equivalence must be scrapped as it is clearly untrue.

Thierry Vrain, Former research scientist for Agriculture Canada and now promoting awareness of the dangers of genetically modified foods.

Sources:
vancouversun.com
GE Watch Comox Valley

May 11, 2013May 14, 2013

The World According To Monsanto Movie Night

May 10, 2013, marks a historic date for our family. On that date, I facilitated our first of what will likely become hundreds of public events dedicated solely to exposing Monsanto, the biotech industry, and genetically modified organisms.

The day started in the early morning hours with a dream. In this dream, I was seated in a hotel conference room. Older people filled the chairs around me. From their conversation I learned we were on some sort of tour together. These people complained incessantly about the service they were receiving on the tour. I paid little attention to their complaints, both because their complaints were trivial and because a group of punk boys were engaged in some sort of shenanigans in the front of the room. The tourists paid no heed to the boys. In fact, they gave no evidence that the boys were even visible to them.

These boys were focused on two or three small pipes running horizontally against the wall in the front of the room. The pipes were attached to the wall some 8 feet or so above the floor of the room. With the aid of ladders and little shelves they hammered into the wall, they studied the pipes, moving their fingers along them until they seemed to find an area of interest.

I grew increasingly anxious in this setting. What were these boys doing? I knew beyond doubt they were up to no good. “Somebody should stop them,” I thought. Somebody with authority, somebody from the hotel. But no such people were present. And my fellow tourists? Why couldn’t they see the boys?

I clearly didn’t fit in with the other tourists. Their complaints bored me, especially at this moment when punks were violating the norms of civilized social behavior. I sat in my chair—paralyzed—knowing that I should get up, say something to the boys, stop them, or go get help. But I felt powerless. I was, after all, just a tourist.

In this state of inner turmoil, I watched a boy position himself on a precarious shelf so he could gain access to a particular part of the pipe. He produced some sort of sharp device—a nail perhaps—held it up to the pipe and pounded on it with a hammer. A spray of water shot forth from the hole and sprayed all of us in the room.

So absorbed were the tourists in their complaints that the spray of water had no effect upon them. Finally, I stood and fled from the room in search of the hotel authorities. I entered the hallway and found hotel guests moving about, confused and afraid. I saw hotel personnel shouting out commands on their hand-held radios. I wanted to tell them what I had observed, but there was no need. I was too late. They already knew. The effect of the hole in the pipe was so sudden and immediate that everyone in the hotel knew.

I was filled with shame. I had seen the boys. I knew they were engaged in something nefarious. Why had I sat there? Why didn’t I respond?

The scene changed. I found myself seated in the office of my former boss. She spoke, as she always speaks, both with compassion and directness. “What were you thinking, Brett? Why didn’t you do something?”

And then I awoke from this meaningless nightmare. The images were fading but the shame filled my soul just as surely as water filled that hotel conference room.

I was glad to be awake, glad to power the computer, glad to write, blog, message, and network. Glad to take my mind off my foolish dream. I had only a few precious hours before work. I had much to do to prepare for the first of our three Monsanto movie nights and Sitka’s March Against Monsanto.

And then it hit me! My dream was not just another meaningless mess full of random images and senseless chatter.

My dream was deeply and perfectly symbolic of the situation facing our modern world.

People of means live their lives as tourists, traveling the world, so self-absorbed in their trivial problems, that they fail to see what’s going on in front of their faces. A gang of boys known as the Big 6—Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont and Syngenta—are working together, poking holes in cells, draining economies, poisoning the world, destroying and killing millions of lives around the world.

And I have sat still far too long, knowing that something is seriously wrong with a food system that is controlled by chemical and pesticide companies. I have sat still, waiting for the authorities to intervene. But now I know, now many of us know, that the authorities are very much aware of what Monsanto and gang are doing. In fact, a growing number of us know that Monsanto and gang are the authorities. They regulate the FDA and the USDA and congress and the White House, not the other way around.

The U.S. government and multi-national corporations have joined hands, bank accounts, and militaries to become the world’s largest and most powerful crime syndicate.

And my conscience is screaming at me. “What are you thinking, Brett? Why aren’t you doing something?”

And finally, I am doing something!

Last night I joined a grand total of six other people—Brittany, Gayle, Kathy, Gus, Jay, and Ryan—to raise awareness of the poison/biotech industry. Together we watched the bulk of The World According To Monsanto, a documentary that presents indisputable proof that Monsanto and gang are lying bullies and criminals.

I learned from one participant that people in Kansas—the land of biotech crops and RoundUp—report that birth defects and stillbirths have become a rather normal event for them. Another participant thanked me for helping him learn more about GMOs. He said he had been so angry about the recent death of his father to Agent Orange that he hadn’t taken the time to consider Monsanto and gang’s ongoing threat to the world.

“So what?” one person asked. “So what if a few of us meet and talk about Monsanto? What does it matter? What good does it do?”

I would like to say I know the answer to that question, but I don’t. It might be too late. The people of my generation have lived their lives asleep, complaining of trivial matters while the government prostitutes itself to the highest bidders. Genetic contamination is inevitable. It’s already happening and it has already wreaked havoc in nature and economies. We don’t yet know how far those effects might spread. Poison saturated food, soil, air, and water is a fact of life that has already sickened and contributed to the deaths of millions. Bees and butterflies are victims of a global holocaust. Will we follow them?

I don’t know, but this I do know. I can’t sit quiet any longer listening to mindless drivel while punks destroy the world.

I honor the people who attended the meeting last night. Our seven won’t phase the Big 6. But consider this? Is there any place on Earth where seven regular citizens met last night in a grassroots effort to support the Biotech Industry? No. But how many people met last night in preparation for the world’s first March Against Monsanto, a march that will inspire millions of people to wake up, stand up, and take action? People—people like you and me—don’t want to eat poisoned food and we don’t want to feed it to the people of the world. We don’t want lying bullies and criminals poking holes in cells, laws, ethics, morals, and economies.

The Biotech Industry only benefits people who profit from the Biotech Industry. It offers nothing but lies and destruction to the rest of us. The irony in this situation is that the people profiting from the Biotech Industry sees themselves as separate from humanity, separate from nature, and separate from the environment. And from that place of separateness they feel free to exploit, war, and profit. But they are not separate from us, and they are not separate from the environment. When they poison poor peasants in Paraguay, they poison themselves. When they exploit Indian farmers, they exploit themselves. When they pollute the soil, they pollute themselves and their children.

If common people are blind to Monsanto and gang, then Monsanto and gang are the most blind of all. Their policies, practices, poisons, and products produce death. And as mere mortals, they are not immune to death. What meaning will their lives have when they realize they have destroyed their own backyards and their own children?

I cannot predict the outcome, but I promise you this: people of conscience are waking up. We are fed up with eating lies and poisons. I am proud to stand among those people, both in Sitka and in the world. And I am so excited to meet with them as David and I run across the U.S.A. in 2014.

Will we win? I don’t know. But we will sound the alarm; we will do every ethical and moral thing we can to counter people who have sacrificed their ethics and morality to Monsanto and gang.

See you on the road!