THE FRANKENFOOD MYTH
By Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko

THE FRANKENFOOD MYTH
By Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko
(Praeger, 290 pages, $39.95)
A book review by Eileen Norcross
WALL STREET JOURNAL December 24, 2004

Imagine a Green Utopia: Overtilled land is returned to the forest. Waterways are unmenaced by the runoff of pesticides, now rarely used. Farmers are spared crop-killing frosts and insect plagues.

The Green Utopia is not a fiction. It arrived in 1973 when Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer spliced the DNA of one species of bacteria into another and cultivated a new organism. With refinements, recombinant DNA technology, or gene-splicing, has given us Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) such as the slow-ripening tomato, vitamin A-enriched rice, and pest-resistant corn. And that is just a glimmer of its potential.

Yet gene-splicing is struggling to survive. The battle over its future is the subject of "The Frankenfood Myth," by Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko. The authors show how foolish policies -- premised on junk science, media sensationalism, and the mixed motives of bureaucrats and corporations -- are choking off a wonder-technology. The word "frankenfood" owes a debt to Green activists, who warned early on that gene-splicing would create a world where superweeds would choke vegetation and monster tomatoes would sit in fields like ticking time-bombs. All baselessly, for the verdict of science is clear: Gene-splicing offers no new risks to man or his environment. Gene-swapping between unrelated organisms happens often in nature, and conventional plant breeding can move genes from one organism to another. Gene-splicing does essentially what hybridization does, but with more precision, predictability and possibility.

Still, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department require that biotech companies perform thousands of field experiments and thousands of hours of data-analysis before marketing their products. The companies have acceded meekly to such regulatory overkill, hoping that it will lessen public fear and thwart startup competition. Instead, it has increased research-and-development costs, diminished the interest of venture capital, and stalled a revolution.

The U.S. biotech industry, once poised to transform agriculture, today merely putters along in staple crops such as soybeans, canola and corn. It has not spread to "small market" fruits and vegetables because costly regulatory requirements outweigh commercial gain.

The state of biotech in Europe is even worse, as Messrs. Miller and Conko remind us. The European Union lifted its ban on gene-splicing only earlier this year, replacing it with a "traceability" rule that requires companies to track all product-ingredients that have gene-spliced origins, however intricately combined they may be. The label on a bottle of ketchup alone could run to Gibbon-like lengths.

The trials of the new biotech are a travesty against reason, but not a human tragedy, at least in the West, where no one will starve if he is denied cheaper, vitamin-enriched foods. Elsewhere, though, the costs are high. In 2002, for instance, during the height of a famine, the Zambian and Zimbabwean governments rejected food aid in the form of gene-spliced corn, contending that, as the authors put it, "they would rather starve to death than get something toxic." But of course there was nothing toxic in what they were being offered.

Such irrational fear need not carry the day. Messrs. Miller and Conko urge those who know the truth about gene-splicing to tell it -- forcefully. As for business, it might take note, for once, that appeasement does not stop fanatics. It only encourages them. -
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BIOTECH SABOTAGE
by GN Sirkin (CN 12-8-04)

Four years ago, scientists succeeded in creating a rice that contains beta-carotene yielding vitamin A. This yellow rice, known as "golden rice," can make a breathtaking difference to millions of children in poor countries whose vitamin-A deficiency causes blindness and increases the risk of death from common childhood diseases.

But no one is eating golden rice. The rice is opposed by environmental activists, particularly Greenpeace. Their campaign has led to regulations that so far have prevented the growing of golden rice.

Golden rice is one of many remarkable agricultural advances that have been opposed by activists and regulated to a standstill by governments. This is a baffling reaction to a great blessing. It needs analysis and explanation.

The need is splendidly filled by The Frankenfood Myth, How Protests and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution by Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko. (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2004, pp. 265, $39.95). Miller is a physician, a molecular biologist, and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Conko is Director of Food Safety Policy in the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The opponents of agricultural innovation say they are fighting genetically modified foods, but they do not fight all types of genetically modified food. The genetic make-up of foods can be changed by selective breeding, that is, finding specimens with a desired characteristic, selecting from their next generation better specimens, and repeating the process till the genetics have been substantially modified.

In addition to selective breeding, genetically modified foods can be produced by cross-breeding or hybridization. Growers can by modern techniques hybridize not only related species but unrelated species.

A third method of genetic modification is mutational breeding, exposing seeds or young plants to chemicals or radiation. By luck, such exposures will occasionally produce a useful mutation. Thousands of crops grown around the world began from mutational breeding.

Genetic modification through selection and hybridization has been going on for thousands of years. No one was frightened by it, no government tried to stop it. Only now that a new method of genetic modification has been devised, do we have fear and regulation. The new method is gene-slicing, or recombinant DNA. Breeders can transfer genetic material from virtually any source in nature. Miller and Conko explain:

By enabling plant breeders and biologists to identify and transfer single genes encoding specific traits of interest, recombinant DNA techniques have greatly refined the less precise, brute-force methods of "conventional" genetic modification.
The environmental activists oppose genetically modified foods, which they call "frankenfoods." They include Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense (Fund), Pew Charitable Trust, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Public Interest Research Group, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth. They do not mention that everything we eat except wild berries, wild mushrooms, and game, has been genetically modified by man.

It is typical of these saboteurs that the one kind of genetic modification they attack, gene-splicing, is the safest. It is precise and easier to assess because it transfers a single gene as compared to pre-biotech methods, which transfer great numbers of different genes.

Arguments for restricting gene-spliced food usually begin with the precautionary principle, which holds that no change should be permitted unless it has been proven safe. Absolute safety cannot be proven. It would be proving that an injury will never happen--- a negative. Who can say what will never happen? Applying the precautionary principle to a change amounts to permanently prohibiting it.

Miller and Conko observe that the precaution argument is not precautionary at all. The dogmatic rejection of technological advances frequently does more to increase than decrease risk. Blocking genetically modified food results in starvation and illness, as in the case of golden rice. In Uganda, where bananas are the primary food staple, a fungus has for several years been destroying the crop, devastating the farmers and threatening mass starvation. A gene-spliced fungus-resistant banana plant was about to be introduced when the European Union persuaded the Ugandan government to stop it.

The fungus-resistant plant clearly poses no risk. The fungus affects only the leaves and stems; the fruit itself is not modified. There is no pollen to spread the modification to other plants. Ignorance and lunacy are running wild.

The benefits from genetic modification are dazzling, and the science is just beginning. The insertion of a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) makes plants resistant to pests and reduces the need for pesticides. The environmental advantages of cutting back on pesticides are obvious, but it doesn't seem to matter to the environmental activists.

The beneficiaries of regulating genetic modification into oblivion are the environmental activist organizations, the agricultural protectionists, and the bureaucrats. The environmental activist organizations raise vast amounts of money with their environmental scares. The European agricultural protectionists are always on the watch for ways to block foreign competition. The bureaucrats like EPA aren't much good at science but are very good at expanding their power and budget.

A prime example of EPA's mismanagement of science is its treatment of a biotech discovery that frost damage can be reduced with a spray produced by gene-splicing. The spray removes from plants a protein that promotes formation of ice crystals.

EPA astonished scientists by classifying the spray as a "pesticide," though no pest is involved. Was that decision intended to give EPA an argument for regulating the treatment? To be sure that the public was sufficiently alarmed, the EPA arranged for scary pictures of plants being sprayed by a scientist in a "moon suit" appropriate for biological warfare, though the spray was known to be harmless. No one worried that journalists and photographers stood around at the spraying without protective gear and in their ordinary clothes. EPA has killed the anti-frost treatment. The ten pages by Miller and Conko on EPA's record of scientific chicanery should be read by every American.

The big losers from the suppression of biotechnology are the poor countries. The biotech revolution offers them a way out of poverty, hunger, and sickness, with no risks except the mythical ones invented by the destroyers of the new science. Whether the world's unfortunates ever get the benefits of the scientific miracle depends on the struggle to overcome the stupidity and cupidity of those posing as the friends of the poor.

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WHY MODIFIED FOOD IS A GOOD IDEA

Review of THE FRANKENFOOD MYTH: HOW PROTEST AND POLITICS THREATEN THE BIOTECH REVOLUTION By Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko Praeger, $39.95, 269 pages
REVIEWED BY CHARLES ROUSSEAUX
The Washington Times December 19th, 2004

Around this time of year, most of us wish we could make food disappear - before we've consumed it. Holiday feasts are as much a part of the season as New Year's fasts.

But what if the food wasn't there? Empty platters and place mats might save some from over-indulgence, but they would also wreck the season, and could harm those faced with continual fasts. Even worse, what if there were plenty of safe-to-eat food on the table, but no one was allowed to touch it? Those already sated might experience hunger pains. Those already starving might perish.

That is exactly what is happening with genetically modified (GM) food, according to Henry Miller and Gregory Conko. In "The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution," they describe how activists and regulators have almost literally taken foods off the table, out of the mouths of those who might choose it and those who desperately need it. Regardless of their motives, those anti-biotech zealots have caused tragic results, and they now threaten what could be the next Green Revolution.

Limiting the growth and production of GM foods might be merited if they proved dangerous according to scientifically defensible standards of risk. But that is not the case. As Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko point out repeatedly, genetically modified foods are actually safer than their "natural" counterparts.

To modify an organism predictably, whether plant or paramecium, one has to first have a sense of what genes are there and how they work together. Attempting modifications blindly - randomly crossing strains of wheat or rice to produce a high-yield line - tends to result in wastage and unpleasant surprises. In fact, farmers have been trying blind modifications for millennia - it's called traditional agriculture.

Modern molecular techniques differ from previous plant-improvement methods only in their higher degree of accuracy. Given that continuum, Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko insist that genetically modified foods are at least as safe for consumption as their conventional counterparts, and probably safer. They do outstanding work putting such foods in the proper context, and then backing up their claims with extensive studies and copious endnotes.

Those facts form the framework for what is essentially a guidebook to the policies and public relations of GM foods. Most of the 200-plus pages in the volume describe their regulatory landscape, ranging from discussions about the derivation of U.S. policies to a description of U.N. biosafety protocols.

It's not reading for the light of heart (or the heavy of stomach). Again and again, regulators have used vacuous reasoning to single out GM foods, increasing their costs and discouraging their developments.

Astonishingly, agriculture companies and even science boards have sometimes joined regulators, under the mistaken assumption that doing so will help allay foolish fears of GM foods. As Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko point out, that tactic has consistently resulted in the sowing of greater anxiety.

Moreover, Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko argue that there is little point in attempting to placate anti-GM foodies, "To well-meaning colleagues who would attempt to propitiate or carry on meaningful dialogue with the anti-science, anti-biotechnology activists, we would counsel that it is fruitless . . . . There is little common ground. One cannot have a reasoned debate with a mugger." In Europe, GM food phobias and over-regulation have reached ridiculous levels. European policy-makers have even placed restrictions on GM foods to prevent hypothetical risks - the precautionary principle. As Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko note, the principle proves problematic in practice, since the potential benefits of the new product are silenced, while the risks inherent to the old product are amplified. The precautionary principle is problematic in principle too, since it is impossible to conclusively rule out all risks.

As the authors repeatedly point out, " 'Completely safe' is a never realized ideal." Rather, risks are always relative. Tradeoffs are inevitable. Policymakers are expected to make decisions based on a rational risk analysis and a careful weighing of alternatives. There are costs for both allowing unsafe products to reach consumers, and for disallowing safe products to reach them. Regulatory structures are much more biased towards preventing the former types of errors (Type I) than the latter (Type II) - it is much easier to see headlines screaming about product recalls than to see the foods (and medicines) that simply are not there.

The book closes with ideas for making policymakers more responsive to Type II errors, and to reforming the regulation of GM foods. Their provocative ideas deserve the attention of policymakers. Unfortunately, the expertise of Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko works against them at some points. They assume that their audience has more than a basic familiarity with the subject - descriptions of the science are sparse. There are no pictures, not even any of genetically modified plants, and the only diagram used is less than illuminating. Ultimately, the book is perfect for policymakers, but may prove difficult going for laypersons.

That is a pity, since there is a need for more books like it. One of America's little noticed freedoms is the freedom to feast and fast when one wants to (or at least as long as one can maintain the willpower). By restricting American's range of food choices, activists and regulators have constricted their freedom.

If the authors are correct - and they make a compelling case - then GM food phobes and regulators have made the world a poorer place. The losses could become even graver if GM food phobes continue to have their way. As Mr. Miller and Mr. Conko argue, "If today's rich nations decide to stop or turn back the clock [to a point at which the new biotechnology is no longer used on GM foods], they will still be rich. But if we stop the clock for developing countries, they will still be poor and hungry. And many of their inhabitants will be dead."

Great costs have already come from the myth that GM foods are unfit for consumption. "Frankenfoods" should have a place at the table of all who want them.
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Charles Rousseaux is the speechwriter for Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The views expressed are his own.