The AquaBounty Salmon: Will the World’s First Commercial GE Animal Be an Albatross?

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson (Photo Credit: Yodod)

Is it unrealistic to expect the scientific approval process for the world’s first commercial genetically engineered (GE) animal, the AquAdvantage salmon, to be rigorous and complete? Or for the applicant to present experiments that fully meet regulatory expectations? If you expect these things, it seems, you expect too much. Despite the biotech industry’s “dedication to rigorous science-based risk assessment”, the science of the AquAdvantage salmon is full of holes. Its maker, AquaBounty Technologies, has failed to provide key data on which the safety assessment process depends.

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GMO Safety and LL601 Rice

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

LL601, the genetically engineered rice variety that has contaminated the US rice supply, is safe. The USDA says so. The UK Food Standards Agency says so. The US Food and Drug Administration, on 12 Sept, stated that: “LL601 rice poses no risk to human health and does not raise any food, feed safety or environmental concerns.” These assertions have been echoed by other organisations such as the USA Rice Federation: “We understand the EU sensibilities are a little different than the United States but nonetheless the product is a safe one”.
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Cisgenic Plants: Just Schouten from the Hip?

Allison Wilson and Jonathan Latham

Many genetic engineers have long resented the regulatory procedures imposed on transgenic crop plants, often arguing that there is no difference between the risks arising from transgenic plants and plants bred using ‘conventional’ methods. A recent proposal calls for complete deregulation of transgenic plants which have only plant DNA inserted into their genomes (Schouten et al., 2006a,b). The term cisgenic has been coined for such plants in order to highlight the origins of the transferred DNA. Other terms for plant-derived transgenes include ‘all-native DNA’ and ‘P-DNA’ (Rommens, 2004).

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Transgene Escape! – But No One Has Called Out the Guards

Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Centre for Food Safety

Introduction

One route by which transgenes (the genes engineered into crops) may cause harm is by permanently escaping from agricultural environments into wild or natural areas. This is not likely to happen with most GMO crop plants, because most crops have been hobbled by millennia of breeding and cannot survive without human intervention, such as planting and weeding. The addition of one or several transgenes generally cannot overcome this long history of domestication. However, most crops have wild relatives that they can interbreed with, thus passing crop genes and transgenes into these wild species. For example, over 20 important crops grown in the U.S. have related wild species they can mate with (1).
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Unapproved Transgene Contaminates US Rice Supply

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

Transgene escape has again become a major biosafety and financial issue. On 18 August the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed that non-transgenic long grain rice in the US was contaminated with Bayer transgene event LL601. This transgene encodes resistance to the herbicide phosphinothricin and LL601 has not been approved (deregulated) for cultivation or use in food supplies in the US or elsewhere. Contamination with LL601 was first detected in January and reported to Bayer in May, Bayer informed the USDA in late July. Contamination however is likely to have predated detection in January since the last permit for growing LL601 rice expired in 2001.
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