Transcript What is really out there?

GMOs
A tale of manipulation, monopoly, Monsanto
and
cheap food
Brian Ellis
Michael Smith Laboratories
UBC
October 24, 2008
GMOs
What are they?
What is really out there?
What impacts are they having?
Where are we going with them?
GMOs
What are they?
What
is really outwhose
there?genome has been
GMOs
are organisms
permanently manipulated by direct insertion
What
areorthey
doing
to us?
of one
more
genes
that were not there before
Where are we going with them?
Mother Nature’s Genetic Engineer
+
Agrobacterium
tumefaciens
‘Crown Gall’
(gall cells contain
bacterial genes
in their genome)
Monsanto’s“Roundup
Ready®” gene
Roundup®-tolerant
Agrobacterium
carrying “Roundup Ready”
gene in an ‘engineered’
bacterial plasmid
Roundup®-sensitive
GMOs
What are they?
What is really out there?
What impacts are they having?
Where are we going with them?
GMO crops
• Commercial
Applications
Altered agronomic traits for
industrial producers
time
•
•
•
•
•
•
Application of Roundup herbicide
Disease/insect resistance
Virus resistance
Herbicide resistance
2008
Salt/drought tolerance
Cold tolerance
Enhanced yields, other
quantitative traits
Corn, cotton, soybeans, canola
Field following application
GM crop use is continually expanding
Nature Biotechnology 25: 271 (2007)
Which countries grow the most commercial GM crops?
USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada
Which countries grow no commercial GM crops?
EU, Japan, NZ
What are the ‘developing countries’ doing about GM crops?
India and China have begun to grow GM cotton
Science
Sept. 08, 2008
GMOs
What are they?
What is really out there?
What impacts are they having?
Where are we going with them?
Are there proven health impacts?
Are there fish genes in
our tomatoes?
What about ‘Golden Rice’?
Microarray analyses reveal that plant mutagenesis
may induce more transcriptomic changes than
transgene insertion
Batista et al
Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci (USA) 105:3640 (2008)
“We found that the improvement of a plant variety
through the acquisition of a new desired trait, using
either mutagenesis or transgenesis, may cause
stress and thus lead to an altered expression of
untargeted genes.
In all of the cases studied, the observed alteration
was more extensive in mutagenized than in transgenic
plants.”
11,267 (51) genes vs. 2,318 (25) genes
Intensive GM crop use
also modifies the
ecology of our
agricultural landscape ...
…but we have been
massively modifying
this ecology for the
past 10,000 years
GMOs
What are they?
What is really out there?
What impacts are they having?
Where are we going with them?
Homo sapiens has become
the dominant species on an
increasingly over-exploited planet
Humans directly exploit ~70% of
temperate and tropical ecosystems
Agriculture
Commercial forests
Human settlements
~50%
~20%
~20%
The greatest single activity affecting
native ecosystem structure and function
is agriculture
Increasing human population size
and aspirations
are putting unsustainable pressure on the
biomass productivity of the planet
This will drive even wider adoption and extension
of GMO technology
as human societies struggle to cope
with loss of productive land / water resources
and the associated food shortages
Something not covered by the new Gene Technology law…