4 Profiles
Introduction
One way of understanding more about the development of genetically modified foods throughout history and around the world is by learning about the lives and work of individuals and organizations that have been involved in that subject. This chapter provides brief biographical sketches of a number of important men and women in the field as well as organizational sketches of groups that have supported that research or worked for or against its implementation in everyday life.
American Academy of Environmental Medicine
6505 E. Central Ave., #296
Wichita, KS 67206
Phone: (316) 684-5500
Fax: (888) 411-1206
Email: administrator@aaemonline.org
URL: http://www.aaemonline.org/
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) was founded in 1965 under the name of the Society for Human Ecology (SHE). The driving force behind the organization was Theron Randolph, a specialist in allergy and immunology. Randolph noted that a number of his patients appeared to be developing allergic symptoms as the result of exposure to a variety of synthetic products in the environment, such as cosmetics, plastics, automotive fuels, exhaust fumes, and food additives. His attempts to encourage other physicians to join in the study of these interactions were largely ineffective, as most traditional allergists and immunologists were not willing to accept cause-and-effect relationships between human health conditions and environmental factors. In an effort to overcome this resistance, Randolph founded SHE in 1965. In 1985, SHE changed its name to its current title.
The fundamental principles on which AAEM is based were stated in an overview statement published by the association in 1992. That statement said that
Environmentally Triggered Illnesses (EI) result from a disruption of homeostasis by environmental stressors. This disruption may result from a wide range of possible exposures, ranging from a severe acute exposure to a single stressor to cumulative relatively low grade exposures to many stressors over time. The disruption can affect any part of the body via dysfunctioning of any number of the body's many biologic mechanisms and systems. The ongoing manifestations of Environmentally Triggered Illnesses are shaped by the nature of stressors and the timing of exposures to them, by the biochemical individuality of the patient, and by the dynamic interactions over time resulting from various governing principles such as the total load, the level of adaptation, the bipolarity of responses, the spreading phenomenon, the switch phenomenon, and individual susceptibility (biochemical individuality). (Quoted in A Report on Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), http://www.health.gov/environment/mcs/toc.htm, accessed on December 8, 2013)
Today, the major focus of AAEM’s activities is the education of physicians and the general public about the interrelationship of environment chemicals and human health. The association is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing education instruction to physicians on a number of such topics and by a variety of mechanisms. For example, the organization offers national and regional conferences on environmental health topics such as “Chronic Disease: Highlighting EMF Hypersensitivity, Lyme, Mycotoxicity, Autism, Cancer and Much More” (2013 annual conference), “Lifestyle Exposures Which Affect Human Health: First Line Therapy for Chronic Disease,” “Environmental Causes of Inflammation and Pain—Integrative Solutions,” and “Fatigue—The Modern Dilemma.” AAEM also offers a series of courses online. Some titles recently available are “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Inhalant Allergies,” “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Food Sensitivities,” “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Chemical Sensitivities,” and “The Metabolism: Nutrition and the New Endocrinology.”
On the association’s web page, the AAEM lists position papers on a number of topics essential to its mission and work. These position papers cover subjects such as radio frequency exposure limits, chemical sensitivities, the use of mercury in vaccines, the role of molds and mycotoxins in human health disorders, the use of fluorides in public water supplies, and government policy on the use of biologically identical compounds of estriol for women.
The issue of genetically modified (GM) foods is a reasonable topic with which the AAEM would be concerned. In general, the association has concerns about the safety of such foods, suggesting that they have not been adequately tested to ensure that they have no effects on human health. In a 2009 position paper, the association recommended that physicians encourage their patients to avoid GM foods whenever possible, to consider the possibility of GM foods as being a source of allergy among their patients, to expand the research currently being done on the safety of GM foods, and to promote a moratorium on the development and production of GM foods until better information is available about their safety.
Biological Regulatory Services
USDA APHIS BRS
4700 River Rd., Unit 147
Riverdale, MD 20737
Phone: (301) 851-3877
Email: biotechquery@aphis.usda.gov
URL: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/index.shtml
Biological Regulatory Services (BRS) is a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). In 1986, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a directive that divided up responsibility for the regulation of genetically engineered organisms among three federal agencies: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and APHIS. For example, the directive assigned responsibility for the approval of genetically engineered animal drugs to the FDA, for the approval of all contained uses to the EPA, and for the approval of genetically engineered plants and animals to APHIS. APHIS, in turn, assigned all responsibilities that it received from the directive to its specialized division in charge of all biotechnology issues, the BRS.
BRS has developed a strategic plan that contains four fundamental goals:
1.Strengthen safeguarding, which involves developing regulatory policies that are timely and commensurate with the risks posed by GM products
2.Strengthen incident and emergency preparedness and response, which involves the dissemination of information about BRS’s role in managing and responding to emergencies, responding effectively to such emergencies, and developing partnerships with other entities for dealing with emergencies
3.Improve communication and outreach, which includes improving contacts with stakeholders in the public and private sector at all levels, from international to local communities
4.Create a highly effective organization, an objective directed at internal issues within BRS, such as hiring the best possible personnel, ensuring that adequate financing is available, and providing for the most supportive work environment possible
BRS carries out its regulatory responsibilities primarily in one of two ways, either through permits and notifications or through petitions. Permits and notifications are authorizations issued by BRS for the release of genetically engineered organisms that have the potential for causing harm to plants in the environment. These statements of approval specify the precise conditions under which importation, interstate transport, or release into the environment may occur such that no real threat to plants is likely to occur. Notifications are essentially comparable to permits, although they are processed online in a more streamlined fashion. Petitions are requests by the producers of GM organisms for deregulation of a particular product, based on a body of scientific evidence that shows that the organism poses no threat to plants in the environment and that it is essentially comparable to naturally occurring organisms to which it is related.
Once permits or notifications have been approved, the BRS has a detailed program of inspection and compliance to ensure that researchers and producers are following conditions stipulated in these documents. In case of an adverse event, researchers and producers are required to report to the agency about the event, providing all relevant details that will allow the agency to make a determination of its severity and of actions that may need to be taken. The agency itself also conducts inspections of field testing and other conditions in which GM organisms may be involved to ensure that permit and notification holders are complying with the terms of their agreement with the agency.
Details of the steps involved in the permit, notification, petition, and inspection aspects of the BRS’s work are available on the agency’s website at http://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/index.shtml. The website also contains a great deal of valuable background and reference material, such as a listing of all relevant legislation and administrative rules dealing with the release of GM organisms, a collection of recent relevant news and information, and a BRS library containing books, articles, and other materials on the agency’s work.
Biotechnology Industry Organization
1201 Maryland Ave., SW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20024
Phone: (202) 962-9200
Fax: (202) 488-6301
Email: info@bio.org
URL: http://www.bio.org
The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is the world’s largest biotechnology trade organization, with more than 1,100 members worldwide. BIO is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization that provides advocacy, business advice, and communication services for its members. BIO members are drawn from every aspect of the biotechnology community, ranging from some of the largest companies in the world, including Amgen, Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, and Sanofi, to smaller companies such as Atossa Genetics, Blueprint Medicines, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, and Prosidion, Ltd. Many major academic institutions are also members, including Emory, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Rush universities, as well as the universities of California (12 campuses), Illinois, Notre Dame, and Pittsburgh.
BIO maintains a very ambitious program of activities, one of the most important of which is advocating for the interests of all aspects of the biotechnology industry. It works on an international, national, and state level for the adoption of legislation, regulations, and other actions that promote biotechnological research and development. As of early 2014, it had two major initiatives: Unleashing the Promise of Biotechnology and International Biotech Policy. The former program involves the development of a comprehensive national strategy that will allow the biotechnology industry to move forward more aggressively, so as to achieve the potential of which it is capable. The second initiative involves drawing upon what the organization regards as the best policies currently in existence in nations around to world to produce a model that can be applied worldwide to produce the most favorable regulatory and political setting for the further development of biotechnology.
Much of BIO’s work is organized into nine major areas: health care, emerging companies, food and agriculture, intellectual property, public policy, industrial and environmental, bioethics, international trade, and small business early stage investment. Most of these areas are further divided into more specialized topics. For example, the health care area is further divided into programs on biopharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution, biosimilars, drug discovery and development, Food and Drug Administration review, personalized medicine, Prescription User Fee Act, reimbursement and health policy, and vaccines and biodefense.
Another large category of the organization’s activities is categorized as industry intelligence and analysis, through which BIO provides its members and other interested individuals and organizations with a host of valuable information about the status of the biotechnology industry. BIO backgrounders, for example, cover topics such as “How to Grow Jobs through Biotech Industry Development,” “Current Uses of Synthetic Biology,” “How Do Drugs and Biologics Differ?” “Background Information on Plant Biotechnology,” and “2010: Awareness & Impressions of Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology.” The organization’s monthly newsletter, BIOtech Now, is available free of charge on the BIO website at http://www.bio.org/articles/welcome-biotech-now.
BIO also provides a very large array of valuable publications, some of which are restricted for member use, but many of which are available online to the general public. The agriculture product database, for example, is an interactive resource in which one can find detailed information about production numbers for a number of important agricultural products from a variety of manufacturers in countries throughout the world. The industry intelligence and analysis page of the website also contains some useful reviews of industry best practices and access to the Battelle/BIO State Bioscience Industry Development, which presents some key findings about the status of the biotechnology industry in the United States. The same page lists a number of publications of general interest to the public, such as “Healing, Fueling, Feeding: How Biotechnology Is Enriching Your Life,” “Biotechnology Solutions for Everyday Life,” “Biotechnology . . . Fields of Benefits,” “BIO Grassroots Handbook,” and “Bioethics—Facing the Future Responsibly.”
The organization also sponsors a variety of conferences, forums, and other meetings on topics of interest in biotechnology, as well as the annual BIO International Conference. Other such events are the annual BIO Investor Forum, the annual CEO and Investor Conference, irregular BioSafe meetings, and the World Conference on Industrial Biotechnology.
José Bové (1953–)
What do the French military, McDonald’s, U.S. tariff policies, and GM soybean seeds have in common? The answer is José Bové, a university trained biologist, sheep farmer, and politician from Aveyron in the Pyrénées region of France. Over the past two decades, Bové has organized or participated in a series of political actions on social, economic, and scientific issues that he sees of international significance.
José Bové was born in Talence, Gironde, France, on June 11, 1953. His parents are Luxembourg-born Joseph-Marie Bové and Colette née Dumeau Bové, specialists in the diseases of fruit trees. José lived the first seven years of his life in Berkeley, California, where his parents conducted their research at the University of California. He then returned to France, enrolling at a private Jesuit bilingual secondary school in Athis-Mons, a small town southeast of Paris. He was later expelled from the school for being “faithless.” Although he did not return to school, he continued to study on his own and eventually took the national baccalaureate exam, the major college-entrance examination in France. He passed the exam in economics avec mention (with honors).
In 1970–1971, Bové moved to the Bordeaux region, where his parents had been working. He enrolled at the University of Bordeaux, thinking perhaps to major in philosophy. However, by that time, he had become so thoroughly involved in political actions that he withdrew from the university to devote all his time to those activities. While still a high school student, for example, he had participated in demonstrations on behalf of conscientious objectors and deserters.
His first political involvement in Bordeaux concerned the French government’s decision to expand its military base on the Larzac plateau. In response to requests from peasants living in the area, Bové and a group of other activists moved into the Larzac area and began building a traditional stone sheep shelter, which they believed would disrupt plans to expand the military base. After working on the project for two years, Bové decided that he like the idea of being a sheep farmer and added that career to his work as a political activist.
In 1987, Bové combined his political and agricultural interests by forming an agricultural union called the Confédération Paysanne. The goal of the organization was the promotion of human and environmental needs in the agricultural process, a goal achieved by focusing local farming activities on organic farming. The event that brought Confédération Paysanne its greatest notoriety took place in 1999 when the McDonald’s organization decided to build a new franchise in the town of Millau in Bové’s home region of Larzac. Members of the Confédération dismantled the half-built McDonald’s building, resulting in a conviction of Bové that sent him to jail for six weeks. The McDonald’s action was initiated not so much specifically against the American corporation itself as it was against what Bové and his colleagues saw as a bastardization of traditional attitudes toward food production and distribution, in which economic interest trumped all other concerns.
At about the same time as the McDonald’s incident, Bové was also becoming increasingly agitated about the threats that he saw GM seeds, crops, and foods posing to French consumers. His position on GM products was that “ [t]he greatest danger that genetically modified corn represents as well as other GM crops resides in the impossibility of evaluating the long term consequences and following the effects on the environment, animals, and humans.” As usual, he expressed his beliefs and concerns with concrete political actions, destroying a stock of GM seeds at a site in France owned by Swiss biotechnology company Novartis in 1998 and destroying GM rice plants at an experimental laboratory in Montpellier in 1999. For these two crimes, Bové was sentenced to a total of 10 months in jail. At the same time, his fame as a political activist and opponent of GM crops and foods had spread worldwide, and he had become a hero for opponents of GM products everywhere.
Bové is as strongly in favor of labeling GM products as he is opposed to such products in general. He argues that the refusal to label GM foods is simply evidence for the control that multinational businesses have over the food industry and agriculture at every label of production, distribution, and sale.
In January 2007, Bové announced that he was a candidate for president of the French Republic. Although he did gain support from a number of French political leaders, he did poorly in the election, garnering 483,000 votes, about 1.32 percent of the popular vote cast in the election. Two years later, he ran for the European Parliament on the slate of Europe Écologie, a coalition of French environmentalist political parties. He won 16 percent of the popular vote in that election, a sufficient number for him to be elected.
Herbert Boyer (1936–)
In the history of DNA technology, the names of Herbert Boyer and Stanley N. Cohen will forever be paired with each other. In 1972, the two researchers were both attending a conference in Hawaii on plasmids, circular loops of DNA found in bacteria and protozoa. Over lunch, the two men found that they were engaged in very similar research projects. Cohen was studying the antibiotic properties of certain bacterial plasmids, whereas Boyer was studying methods for introducing cut DNA into precisely defined segments with ends that could be attached to other pieces of DNA. The two decided to collaborate and within four months had carried out one of the classic studies in the history of molecular biology. In these studies, they introduced specified pieces of DNA into a bacterial plasmid (using methods developed by Boyer) and then inserted the plasmid into bacteria (using methods developed by Cohen). The results of these experiments were bacteria whose DNA contained clearly defined segments of foreign DNA (genes) capable of synthesizing specific proteins. When those bacteria reproduced, they then became tiny “factories” for the production of those proteins, the earliest forerunners of contemporary industrial rDNA technologies.
Herbert Wayne Boyer was born in Derry, Pennsylvania, on July 10, 1936. He received his AB from St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1968, and his MS and PhD (bacteriology) from the University of Pittsburgh in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He did his postdoctoral work at Yale University as a U.S. Public Health Service research fellow from 1963 to 1966. In 1966, Boyer left Yale to accept a position at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) as assistant professor of microbiology. He was promoted to associate professor of microbiology in 1971, associate professor of biochemistry in 1975, and full professor in the department of biochemistry and biophysics in 1976, a post he held until his retirement in 1991. Boyer also served as director of the graduate program in genetics from 1976 to 1981. He currently holds the title of emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the UCSF School of Medicine.
In 1976, Boyer and venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson founded the world’s first corporation for the development of commercial products made with rDNA research, Genentech, Inc. Within its first year of operation, Genentech had produced the first commercial rDNA product, the hormone somatostatin. Boyer served as vice president of Genentech from its founding until his retirement from the company, also in 1991.
Among the honors given to Boyer are the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1980), Industrial Research Institute Achievement Award (1982), National Medal of Technology (1989), National Medal of Science (1990), Helmut Horten Research Award (1993), Lemelson-MIT Prize (1996), Biotechnology Heritage Award (2000), Albany Medical Center Prize (2004), Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2004), the Perkin Medal of the American section of the Society of Chemical Industry (2007), and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Double Helix Medal (2009). The graduate faculty at UCSF has created the Herbert W. Boyer Program in Biological Sciences in recognition of Boyer’s contribution to the university. In 1990, Boyer and his wife Grace donated the single largest sum ever given to the Yale School of Medicine by an individual or family, $10,000,000. In recognition of that gift, the university named a new facility in the Boyers’ honor, the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine, in 1991.
Canadian Biotechnology Action Network
180 Metcalfe St., Suite 206
Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 1P5
Canada
Phone: (613) 241-2267, ext.25
Fax: (613) 241-2506
Email: info@cban.ca
URL: http://www.cban.ca/
The Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) had its origins in informal meetings in 1999 among 23 environmental, social justice, and consumer groups that met to develop a common strategy for dealing with issues raised by the increasing use of genetic engineering in the development of crops and foods and in other areas. That information affiliation was successful in achieving a number of goals, including the prohibition of milk produced from cows treated with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) and abandonment by Monsanto of its plans to introduce genetically engineered wheat into the country. In 2006, participating groups decided to formalize its relationship with the creation of the CBAN under the auspices of Tides Canada. Tides Canada is a national charity that focuses on issues of importance to the people of Canada and their natural environment by connecting donors with worthy projects.
CBAN’s current mission statement calls for the organization
to promote food sovereignty and democratic decisionmaking on science and technology issues in order to protect the integrity of the environment, health, food, and the livelihoods of people in Canada and around the world by facilitating, informing and organizing civil society action, researching, and providing information to government for policy development.
Among the organizations that currently make up CBAN are ACT for the Earth (Toronto), Canadian Organic Growers, Ecological Farmers of Ontario, Food Action Committee of Ecology Action Centre (Halifax), GE Free Yukon, GeneAction (Toronto), Greenpeace Canada, National Farmers Union, P.E.I. Coalition for a GMO-Free Province, Saskatchewan Organic Directorate, Society for a G.E. Free B.C., and Union Paysanne. The organization also receives support from a variety of commercial enterprises, including The Big Carrot Natural Foods (Toronto); Julie Daniluk, RHN, Daniluk Consulting; Eatmore Sprouts (British Columbia); ETC Group (Ottawa); Harmony Organic (Ontario); and Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds (Saskatchewan).
CBAN activities are based on four primary objectives:
1.Facilitating collaborative campaigning at the local, regional, national, and international levels
2.Enabling individual Canadians to take strategic and effective action
3.Researching and monitoring new technologies and providing credible information
4.Challenging government to transparency, accountability, and democratic process
At the beginning of 2014, CBAN was pursuing four major projects: No GM Fish, Get GM Sweet Corn Out, Stop the GM Apple, and Stop Legalized Contamination from Unapproved GM Foods: “Low Level Presence.” Each of these projects has been created in opposition to specific efforts by companies to introduce new GM products into Canada. The No GM Fish project, for example, was developed to oppose the request by a U.S. company, AquaBounty, to begin marketing a GM form of salmon that grows throughout the year rather than during only a certain season each year. The project consists largely of writing to the Canadian Minister of the Environment, expressing one’s objection to the approval of this request.
The CBAN website is also a very rich source of information on a large variety of topics, such as agrofuels; corporate control of the food supply; environmental impacts of GM crops; specific GM products, such as apples, alfalfa, flax, potatoes, rice, wheat, cotton, corn, canola, soybeans, sugar beets, and fish; GE Free Zones; experimental work on GM goats, trees, and other organisms; human health risks; labeling issues; nanotechnology; patents; regulation and policy; synthetic biology; and terminator technology. It also provides some very useful information on tools that can be used by individuals and organizations to express their opposition to GM products, such as relevant articles, briefing notes, consumer guides, e-news, films, maps, pamphlets, factsheets, photos and graphics, reports, and workshops and presentations.
The organization also sponsors, cosponsors, and advertises a variety of events of interest to individuals who oppose the use of GM foods and crops in Canada. Some recent examples include the recently produced play Seeds about the legal battle between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and the Monsanto company; the showing of the film GMO OMG, dealing with issues of GM products in today’s world; and a webcast featuring a panel of four food experts on the challenges of feeding a world of 9 billion people. A frequently asked questions section of the website also provides a brief but excellent general introduction to the issue of GM crops and foods.
Center for Food Safety
660 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, #302
Washington, DC 20003
Phone: (202) 547-9359
Fax: (202) 547-9429
Email: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/contact-us
URL: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) was founded in 1997 by attorney, environmental activist, and consumer advocate Andrew Kimbrell, who still serves as executive director of the organization. CFS was founded as a nonprofit organization for the purpose of working to protect human health and the natural environment by opposing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture.
The center organizes its activities around 10 major themes: genetic engineering, seeds, pollinators and pesticides, animal cloning, food and climate, aquaculture, food safety, factory farms, organic and beyond, and nanotechnology. Two of these themes are further subdivided into more specific categories: genetic engineering into GE foods, GE food labeling, GE fish, GE animals, GE insects, and GE trees; and food safety into food safety (in general), food irradiation, rbGH, mad cow disease, and sewage sludge. For each of these topics, the CFS website provides detailed information about the issue and suggestions for ways in which consumers can become involved in actions to resolve specific issues. For each topic, there is also a list of publications and resources that include reports on the topic, legal actions taken with respect to the issue, policy statements by various organizations, testimony provided by CFS representatives and other individuals, and news about recent development with regard to the issue. The web page on aquaculture, for example, provides an essay defining and describing the process, a discussion of the forces responsible for the depletion of ocean resources, a description of the threats posed to the marine environment and marine wildlife, a review of human health risks posed by the practice of aquaculture, a description of special issues related to shellfish aquaculture, and a summary of regulation relevant to aquaculture practices. The usual list of publications and other resources is also included.
The center has also developed a number of initiatives to which members and interested readers are invited to participate. Examples of those initiatives include campaigns to get Lowe’s and Home Depot to stop selling pesticides that are toxic to honeybees, to stop the development of genetically engineered fish, and to stop GE crop field tests; and petitions to get the Environmental Protection Agency more involved in efforts to protect honeybees, to urge the retailer Trader Joe’s to stop selling meat containing antibiotics, and to convince the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ban the growing and sale of genetically engineered apples.
CFS also makes available to members and interested others a wide range of print and electronic publications in the form of fact sheets, newsletters, reports, policy statements, testimonials, and legal actions. Examples of fact sheet topics that are available are “Guide to Avoiding GE Fish,” “Factory Farms: Antibiotics in Distiller Grains,” “Pollinators & Pesticides,” “Help the Honeybees: A List of Pesticides to Avoid,” and “Genetically Engineered Foods: The Labeling Debate.” The organization’s primary newsletter is Food Safety Now. It also provides news electronically to subscribers on its True Food Network.
Among the reports available from the organization on its website are “Best Public Relations That Money Can Buy: A Guide to Food Industry Front Groups,” “Genetic Engineered Food Labeling Laws Map,” “Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers,” “Pollinators & Pesticides: A Report by Center for Food Safety on Pollinator Health, Research, and Future Efforts for Pollinator Protection,” and “Food Safety Review: Going Backwards: Dow’s 2,4-D-Resistant Crops and a More Toxic Future.”
Mary-Dell Chilton (1939–)
Chilton is best known for her research on the process by which Agrobacterium bacteria infect tobacco plants. Her team showed that a bacterium is able to transmit its DNA into the host plant genome and that, furthermore, removal of disease-causing genes from the bacterial DNA does not affect this process. The information gained from these studies demonstrated the feasibility of producing transgenic plants by inserting foreign genes into the genome of a host plant, giving it the ability to produce proteins not typically associated with the native plant. The experiments conducted by Chilton’s team have now become classics in the field of genetic engineering of plants. In 2013, Chilton was awarded a share of the World Food Prize, widely recognized as one of the highest honors that can be granted for accomplishments in the invention, development, and application of new products through modern agricultural biotechnology.
Mary-Dell Chilton was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on February 2, 1939. She was originally interested in astronomy and was a finalist in the 1956 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for building “a long telescope in a short tube.” She planned to major in astronomy when she entered the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana in 1956, but soon she found that her instructors did not take her seriously because she was a woman. She briefly transferred to physics but found that subject boring, so eventually decided to major in chemistry, earning her BSc in that subject in 1960 and her PhD, also in chemistry, in 1967. Chilton then accepted an appointment at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she remained until 1979. It was at the University of Washington that she conducted much of her initial work on the production of transgenic plants.
In 1979, Chilton moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where she continued her research on the genetic modification of tobacco plants. After four years, she resigned her academic position to take a job with the CIBA-Geigy Corporation (now Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc.) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. At Syngenta, she has been involved in both research and administrative activities, serving as principal scientist, distinguished science fellow, and vice president of agricultural biotechnology. In addition to the World Food Prize, Chilton has been honored with a number of other awards, including the American Institute of Chemists Bronze Medal (1960), Rank Prize in Nutrition of the United Kingdom (1967), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1986), the David Gottlieb Medal of the University of Illinois (1986), the Hendricks Medal of the American Chemical Society (1987), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), election as a fellow to the American Academy of Microbiology (1994), the John Scott Award of the City of Philadelphia (2000), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (2002), and the CSSA Presidential Award of the Crop Science Society of America (2011). In 2009, Washington University established the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professorship in Arts and Sciences in her honor. She has published well over 100 scientific papers in the field of the genetic modification of organisms.
Chilton had been married for more than two decades to Dr. Scott Chilton, professor of botany in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. He died unexpectedly in 2004. In her retirement years, Chilton is no longer involved with company projects, although she does continue to work in her laboratory at Syngenta, working on projects that interest her, no matter the future practical value they may or may not have.
Stanley N. Cohen (1935–)
Cohen and Herbert Boyer performed one of the classic experiments in the early history of DNA technology in the early 1970s when they found a way to insert a foreign gene into a plasmid, a double-stranded circular piece of DNA found in bacteria and protozoa. This technology allowed Cohen and Boyer to make duplicate copies (clones) of precise segments of DNA from any given source.
Stanley Norman Cohen was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, on February 17, 1935. His grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe and settled in Perth Amboy, where Cohen’s parents were also born. In his autobiography, Cohen remembers Perth Amboy as a “wonderful paradigm of ethnic, religious, and racial diversity,” in which he lived a very typical childhood and adolescence. He played basketball and football and worked in a variety of jobs during the week and sold magazine subscriptions on the weekend. He was torn between his interests in physics and biology in high school, but eventually he chose the latter and decided to become a geneticist.
He entered Rutgers University in the fall of 1952, where he majored in premedical studies. He was granted his BA in biological sciences in 1956, and then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, from which he received his MD in 1960. He then did his residency, internship, and medical research at a number of institutions, including University Hospital at the University of Michigan, Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, Duke University Hospital, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. At some point during these studies, Cohen recognized the fact that he was more interested in the research side of medicine than in clinical work, so began to focus his postgraduate studies in the former field. His future was sealed when he was given a fellowship at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where he was introduced to the new and growing field of molecular biology. After additional studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, he accepted his first academic appointment as assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. He was named professor of medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine in 1975, professor of genetics in the School of Medicine in 1977, and Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Medicine in 1993, titles that he continues to hold. Cohen also served as trustee at the University of Pennsylvania and its Medical Center from 1989 through 2002. An award of excellence in biomedical research has been named in his honor at Pennsylvania.
Cohen and Boyer met at a conference in Hawaii on bacterial plasma and over lunch discovered that their research interests melded with each other beautifully. At the time, Cohen was studying methods for inserting plasmids into bacteria to study their ability to develop resistance to certain antibiotics. Boyer was working on the development of certain kinds of enzymes that cut DNA into precisely defined segments with “sticky” ends. The two combined their skills to develop a method for inserting precise DNA segments into plasmids and then inserting those plasmids into bacteria. The modified bacteria could, by this method, be “engineered” to produce any desired protein product specified by the inserted DNA and, in this regard, marked the beginning of industrial biotechnology based on rDNA molecules.
Cohen’s research interests range over a wide array of topics, including the development and evolution of antibiotic resistance, the function of ribonucleic acids (RNA) in cells, and possible molecular mechanisms for the rise of neurological disorders in animals.
In his long and illustrious career, Cohen has received a number of awards and honors, including the Wolf Prize in Medicine (1971), Lemelson-MIT Prize (1996), Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1980), National Medal of Science (1988), National Medal of Technology (1989), Albany Medical Center Prize (2004), Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2004), and Double Helix Medal (2009).
Council for Biotechnology Information
United States
1201 Maryland Ave., SW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20024
Phone: (202) 962-9200
Email: cbi@whybiotech.com
URL: http://www.whybiotech.com/
Canada
105L 111 Research Dr.
Saskatoon, SK, S7N 3R3
Phone: (416) 922-1944
Toll-Free: (1) (866) 922-1944
Email: info@canadacbi.com
URL: http://www.whybiotech.ca/
Mexico
AgroBIO Mexico A.C.
Dakota No. 2004, Oficina 302, Col. Nápoles
C.P. 03810, Mexico DF
Phone: +52 55 55438489
Email: agrobio@agrobiomexico.org.mx
URL: http://www.agrobiomexico.org.mx/
The Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) is a nonprofit 501 (c)6 organization created for the purpose of providing information about the benefits and safety of agricultural biotechnology and its role in sustainable development. The organization was created in April 2000 and has major offices in three countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Member organizations of the CBI as of early 2014 were BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences LLC, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta.
The basic premise behind the CBI program is that bioengineered organisms can improve human life around the world by increasing the size and quality of harvests, find new ways of meeting the world’s energy needs, and develop new crops that can survive in otherwise inhospitable areas, such as deserts, saline environments, or unusually cold lands. Some of the specific messages that the council makes available are that
•New crops can be developed that have higher nutritional content than comparably occurring nature crops.
•GM crops can improve the quality and quantity of crops in developing nations, thus helping to solve one of the most important problems faced by those nations.
•Respected authorities around the world have come to the conclusion that bioengineered crops are safe and healthy for humans and domestic animals.
•Bioengineered crops can help farmers save water, thus helping to solve another environmental problem faced by many places in the world.
•The use of GM crops can greatly reduce the amount of pesticides used in agriculture, thus reducing both costs to farmers and potential health risks for consumers.
•Crops can be engineered so as to make them useful as biofuels, helping to deal with yet another important social issue.
The main focus of CBI’s work is on the dissemination of information about the benefits and safety of GM crops and foods. It accomplishes this objective with a variety of print, electronic, and visual materials. For example, its web page provides pages on topics such as third-party (neutral) studies on the safety and efficacy of genetically engineered crops, a list of experts who are available to answer questions and provide information about GM foods, a timeline of the development of agricultural biotechnology, and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section that provides answers to common questions about engineered crops and foods. The council also provides fact sheets in print and electronic form that deal with fundamental issues related to GM foods, including “Helping Increase Crop Yields for America’s Farmers,” “Biotechnology and Biofuels: Providing Renewable Energy while Reducing Carbon Emissions,” “Biotechnology and Drought: Producing More Crop per Drop,” “Biotechnology and Food: Helping Increase Global Food Security,” and “Biotechnology and Sustainability: Supporting Sustainable Solutions in Agriculture.”
The organization’s visual presentations include online slideshows on topics such as “Agricultural Biotechnology and Sustainaiblity,” “How Biotechnology Is Helping Increase Global Food Production,” “Biotechnology and Biofuels: Fueling Growth for Today and Tomorrow,” and “Biotechnology and Drought: Helping Produce ‘More Crop per Drop’.” CBI also offers a number of video programs on similar topics (e.g., “World without Food Science” and “Connecting Farmers”), as well as its own YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/CBIWashingtonDC) and Green State TV, which provides interviews with people interested in the use of GM foods to help solve a variety of worldwide problems.
Groups opposed to the development and use of GM foods have pointed out the association of CBI with biotechnology firms and have raised questions as to how unbiased the information is that is provided by the council. Without question, however, the council does provide a host of useful and generally accurate information about one side of the controversy about GM agricultural products.
CropGen
PO Box 38589
London SW1A 1WE
United Kingdom
Phone (in UK) 020-7025-2333
(from overseas) +44-20-8451-0784
Email: cropgen@f2s.com
CropGen is an organization targeted at the media and the general public with the goal of promoting research on and the use of GM crops and foods. The organization is based in the United Kingdom, but it has members from many other parts of the world, including Egypt, Germany, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States. It provides expert advice on topics relating to the genetic modification of plants and animals in specialized fields such as bioethics, biotechnology law, economics of GM agriculture, farming and agricultural chemicals, GM foods and human health, GM issues and the public media, plant ecology and weed control, plant genetics and agriculture, plant breeding and biodiversity, and regulation and coexistence.
A core section of the association’s website is the question and answer page that provides information on topics such as the history of the genetic modification of foods, the extent to which GM foods are present in the marketplace, who produces GM foods, what the justification for GM foods is, how GM foods can benefit human life, what medical benefits there may be for GM foods and other products, what contributions the genetic modification of plants may have for other fields such as energy production, and what dangers and risks GM crops and foods may pose. The web page also provides links to about four dozen organizations that can provide additional information about and support for the invention and use of GM products.
CropGen was established in 2000 with a grant of nearly £500,000 from a consortium of biotechnology firms including BASF, the Crop Protection Association, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta. For the first three years of its existence, it was operated by the public relations firm Countrywide Porter Novelli, after which management was transferred to another public relations firm, Lexington Communications. CropGen says that its objective is to make available unbiased scientific information in support of the greater use of GM foods and that no one associated with the organization is funded by any biotechnology company or by any organization that works on behalf of GM products.
In addition to its very useful website, the organization takes part in radio and television interviews, offers speakers for debates and other types of meetings, and briefs journalists on issues related to GM foods. An item of special interest on its website is a list of articles under the section “Highlights,” which have dealt most recently with topics such as the safety of GM foods for humans and domestic animals, the discovery of the presence of modified gene fragments in human blood, changes in Russian attitudes toward GM foods, the discovery of GM wheat in Oregon, and current UK policy on GM foods and crops.
Food & Water Watch
1616 P St., NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 683-2500
Fax: (202) 683-2501
Email: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/about/contact-us/
URL: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org
Food & Water Watch was formed in 2005 by 12 members of the Energy and Environment Program of the nonprofit organization Public Citizen. The organization’s mission is to work to ensure that the food and water available to people is safe and accessible and that it is produced by sustainable methods. Over time, the organization has expanded its array of programs that currently include specific issues such as bottled water, climate change, consumer labels desalination, factory farms and factory fish farming, the federal budget, food and water justice, food safety, fracking, genetically engineered foods, groundwater protection, irradiation, nanotechnology, water conservation, water privatization, and worldwide water resources.
The organization provides on its web page an overview of some of its most important accomplishments over the past decade. These achievements include the following:
•Playing a role in Maryland state legislation to ban the presence of arsenic in chicken feed
•Running a campaign to encourage Starbucks to stop using milk produced by rBGH cows
•Working with inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to maintain the highest possible standards of food inspection
•Protecting small farms from new federal legislation designed more specifically for large corporate farms
•Advocating for rigorous labeling regulations on foods imported from outside the United States
•Organizing to protect water supplies by eliminating the use of the hazardous chemical triclosan in consumer products
•Cooperating with other organizations to promote adoption of a bill in New Jersey to ban fracking in the state
•Preventing the conversion of publicly owned water purification systems to private companies in a number of localities across the United States
Food & Water Watch has adopted a four-pronged approach in pursuit of its programs that includes a program of education about such issues for the general public and policy makers; lobbying of those policy makers for the adoption of programs consistent with the organization’s mission; promotion of information about food and water issues through a variety of media; and encouragement of activism among members and other interested parties primarily through its Internet site.
A vital aspect of Food & Water Watch work is providing materials that educate the general public and policy makers on critical issues. These materials are often available in the form of fact sheets on topics such as “The World Food Prize,” “Save Antibiotics for Medicine, Not Factory Farms,” “United Water: A Corporate Profile,” “Monsanto’s Seed Company Subsidiaries,” and “How Much Do Labels Really Tell You?” In addition to fact sheets, the organization offers other types of research information in the form of reports, issue briefs, case studies, and corporate profiles. Examples of each are “The Social Costs of Fracking,” “The EPA’s Failure to Track Factory Farms,” “Citrus County, Florida,” and “Aqua America,” respectively.
Food & Water Watch also provides a variety of tools to help the average citizen better understand some important issues in the field and to learn how to deal with these issues. The “Take Back the Tap Guide to Safe Tap Water,” for example, provides guidance as to how citizens can understand water quality reports that are commonly issued by local water companies and how they can use this information to purchase water filters for their home and take such other actions that will improve the likelihood of getting clean water in their homes. The “Smart Seafood Guide” helps consumers learn more about the fish products that are available for sale in their markets, including knowing whether or not the fish is caught or farmed locally, how the fish is caught or farmed, and what contaminants may be associated with fish products.
The news section of the organization’s website provides access to a blog dealing with its major topics, a collection of recent news reports, press releases about important issues, events of interest to members and to the general public, and video productions dealing with food and water issues.
Robert T. Fraley (1953–)
Fraley was honored with a share of the 2013 World Food Prize, awarded annually by the World Food Prize Foundation to individuals “who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.” The prize was conceived in the mid-1980s by Norman Borlaug, who had himself won a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the relief of human hunger around the world. Fraley was honored for his research on methods for transforming the genome of plants important in agriculture.
Robert Thomas Fraley was born in Danville, Illinois, on January 25, 1953. He was brought up on a farm in nearby Hoopeston, Illinois; grew grain; and maintained livestock. It goes almost without saying that this early experience made a life-long impression on Fraley who was eager to have a chance to improve agricultural technology to meet the needs of hungry people worldwide. Upon completing high school, Fraley entered the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, where he received his bachelor’s degree in biology in 1974, his master’s in 1976, and his PhD in microbiology and biochemistry in 1978. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco.
At the conclusion of his studies, Fraley took a position with the Monsanto company, where he has remained ever since. His first appointment at Monsanto was as senior research specialist, after which he worked his way up through the ranks to eventually become executive vice president and chief technology officer.
Fraley’s first technical breakthrough in the engineering of plants came in 1983 when he and three of his colleagues reported on a method for introducing genes into plants providing those plants with immunity to certain diseases and adverse environmental conditions. In recognition of this achievement, Fraley was awarded a share of the 1986 Charles A. Thomas & Carroll A. Hochwalt Award for innovative basic science by Monsanto. A year later, Fraley worked on the team that developed and tested the first genetically engineered tomato, the Flavr Savr tomato. In 1996, Fraley was also involved in research on another important GM breakthrough, the development of plants resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready insecticide.
In addition to the World Food Prize, Fraley has received a number of other honors for his research on the genetic manipulation of plants, including the Edgar M. Queeny award, the highest honor that Monsanto offers for research in biotechnology (1996); the National Medal of Technology, given to Fraley in a ceremony at the White House by President Bill Clinton (1999); and the National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science (2008). In 2004, Fraley was also awarded an Alumni Achievement Award by the University of Illinois. Since 1981, Fraley has also served as adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
John E. Franz (1929–)
In the field of GM crops, few discoveries have been as important as that of the chemical known as glyphosate, whose technical name is N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine. Glyphosate is classified as a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide, a substance that is taken up by a wide range of plants and is toxic to those plants because it interferes with their growth. Glyphosate was discovered in 1970 by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz, and it is now the primary ingredient in the company’s widely popular herbicide, Roundup. Roundup became a critical tool in the arsenal of modern agriculture when Monsanto developed GM plants carrying a gene making them resistant to glyphosate. Thus, farmers could plant a crop of GM corn, soybeans, cotton, or some other crop resistant to glyphosate and then spray the field with Roundup. The pesticide kills most weeds present in the field but has no effect on the so-called Roundup Ready GM crop.
John Edward Franz was born in Springfield, Illinois, on December 21, 1929. He became fascinated with the study of chemistry at the age of 10 and decided that he would make his career in that field. His interest in chemistry was so intense that he decided to ignore any other subject and had to be convinced by one of his high school teachers that he really needed to focus on physics, mathematics, and other subjects to do well in college.
Franz matriculated at the University of Illinois, from which he earned his bachelor of science degree (in chemistry, of course) in 1951. He then continued his studies at the University of Minnesota, which granted him his PhD in organic chemistry in 1955. After graduation, he was offered positions with both Monsanto and Dow Chemical, eventually choosing to accept Monsanto’s offer. He began work as a research chemist at the company’s Organic Chemicals Division in St. Louis in 1955. He remained with the company for his entire career, become group leader of the Organic Chemicals Division in 1959, science fellow in the same division in 1962, and then science fellow in the Agricultural Products Division in 1967. It was in this position that he carried out his research on herbicides for use in agricultural settings and discovered glyphosate in the process. This research was based on an incorrect interpretation of studies conducted on herbicidal action conducted over a nine-year period by his colleagues that produced an effective compound nonetheless. Among glyphosate’s many advantages is that it has no toxic effects on a broad range of animal life, ranging from most bacteria to insects, fish, birds, and mammals.
In 1975, Franz was appointed senior science fellow in the Agricultural Products Division. Five years later, he was named distinguished science fellow in the division, a title he held until his retirement from Monsanto in 1994.
Franz has more than 840 patents to his credit, most of them dealing with some aspect of glyphosate. He has also received many honors based on that one discovery, including the IR-100 award of Industrial Magazine in 1977, the first J. F. Queeny Award from Monsanto in 1981, the National Medal of Technology in 1987, the Carothers Award of the American Chemical Society in 1989, the Perkins Medal of the American Section of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1990, the Outstanding Achievement Award of the University of Minnesota in 1988, the Missouri Award of the Missouri Department of Economic Development in 1988, and the Inventor of the Year Award of the St. Louis Metropolitan Bar Association in 1986. He was inducted into the United States Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2007.
Dennis Gonsalves (1943–)
American plant pathologist Dilworth D. Jensen wrote a paper in 1949 describing a disease affecting the papaya plant in Hawaii that he attributed to the papaya ringspot virus (PRSV). The disease causes chlorosis (yellow splotches) to develop on leaves and oily liquids to escape from the plant’s petioles (the region at which a leaf is attached to a stem). In more severe cases, the plant fails to produce healthy fruit and is of no economic value. Given the critical role of the papaya in the Hawaiian economy, agricultural researchers began an aggressive campaign to find ways of combating PRSV disease. Conventional methods for the control of such diseases were largely unsuccessful. For example, quarantining of plants failed to control the disease because the disease vector, an aphid, was able to reach quarantined areas rather easily. Cross-protection (the introduction of a weaker strain of PRSV with the intention of improving plant immunity) also proved unsuccessful. In 1985, Cornell plant pathologist Dennis Gonsalves began research on a genetically engineered form of the papaya plant (Carica papaya). That research was based on the principle that a plant that contains a gene or a DNA fragment similar to that of a pest will have immunity to that pest. So Gonsalves and his colleagues began to look for a way to insert into the papaya genome a portion of the PRSV genome, hoping that the product would have immunity to the viral disease.
Gonsalves’s team achieved success in 1991 with a product known as papaya 55-1. Field tests confirmed that the varietal was indeed resistant to the virus, and it soon became commercially available under the trade names of SunUp and Rainbow. Researchers were so excited by their discovery that they began to distribute 55-1 seeds at no cost to Hawaiian farmers after the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the new products. Today more than three-quarters of the papaya grown in Hawaii is some form of the genetically engineered product. It is no exaggeration to say that Gonsalves’s research saved the papaya industry in Hawaii.
Dennis Gonsalves was born in Kohala, Hawaii, on April 2, 1943. His father was a Portuguese immigrant whose father’s parents had come from the Azores and Madeira Islands and whose mother was Hawaiian-Chinese. Gonsalves remembers that he was not especially interested in an academic career from childhood through his high school years. However, his attitudes changed when he was accepted at the prestigious Kamehameha School in Honolulu, which had been founded for the specific purpose of educating native Hawaiian children. Gonsalves decided to continue his education as an agricultural engineer at the University of Hawaii, but when that field no longer seemed to hold employment opportunities, he switched to horticulture. He eventually earned both his BS and MS degrees from Hawaii in 1965 and 1968, respectively. He then continued his education at the University of California at Davis, from which he received his PhD in plant pathology in 1972.
The event that Gonsalves said changed his life occurred while he was still at the University of Hawaii, working as a plant technician in the laboratory of Eduardo Trujillo, a plant pathologist for the University of Hawaii on the island of Kauai. Trujillo suggested to Gonsalves that the newly discovered PRSV disease might be an interesting topic for research. As soon as he began a study of the disease, Gonsalves later said, he knew that he wanted to become a plant pathologist, with special emphasis on the study of viral diseases in plants. Gonsalves also picked up on Trujillo’s suggestion that he should focus on research that has practical applications and not to get carried away with abstract studies. It was under the guidance of Trujillo, therefore, that Gonsalves set off on a career of practical research in the study of viral diseases of the papaya.
After completing his studies at Davis, Gonsalves took a job as assistant professor at the University of Florida, where he remained until 1977. While at Florida, he worked at the Agricultural Research and Education Center at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at Lake Alfred, where he carried out research on the diseases of citrus trees. He then moved to Cornell University, where he spent the rest of his academic career. He served as associate professor of plant pathology at Cornell from 1977 to 1986 and full professor from 1987 to his retirement in 2002, at which time he was named professor emeritus at Cornell. In 2002, Gonsalves also decided to return to his native Hawaii, where he took the position of University of Hawaii graduate and center director of the USDA Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo. Gonsalves has received the Alexander von Humboldt award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2002) and the Leadership in Science Public Service Award of the American Society of Plant Biologists (2003).
Greenpeace International
Ottho Heldringstraat 5
1066 AZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0) 20 718 2000
Fax: +31 (0) 20 718 2002
Email: supporter.services.int@greenpeace.org
URL: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/
Greenpeace United States
702 H St., NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 462-1177
Fax: (202) 462-4507
Email: info@wdc.greenpeace.org
URL: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/
Greenpeace was founded in 1971 when a group of environmentalists leased a small fishing vessel to protest nuclear tests being conducted off the coast of Alaska. The region in which the testing was to take place was the last refuge of a number of endangered and threatened species, so the mission was a campaign against both the use of nuclear weapons and the potential destruction of endangered wildlife. The fishing boat was intercepted and prevented from reaching its destination, and the weapons test was carried out as planned. However, the impetus for the campaign was by no means lost, and the organization grew over the next 40 years to become one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the world. Today, Greenpeace has a worldwide membership of about 2.8 million individuals and a membership of 250,000 in the United States. The organization has 32 national and regional offices, as well as international headquarters in Amsterdam.
The controlling legal structure of Greenpeace is a Dutch nonprofit organization whose legal name is Stichting Greenpeace Council that provides general oversight and direction for the organization. A seven-member board of directors approves the annual budget and appoints the executive director, who is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the organization. Each regional office is organized in a similar fashion and elects a representative to the organization’s annual general meeting, which elects the board of directors, approves new Greenpeace organizations, authorizes the annual budget, and sets policy priorities for the coming year.
As of early 2014, Greenpeace has focused its efforts on six major topics: climate change, forests, oceans, agriculture, toxic pollution, and nuclear issues, for each of which it has developed a comprehensive and detailed plan of action. The Greenpeace campaign against GM foods is part of its agriculture mission. The organization describes GM foods as possible threat to human health and the environment and suggests that adequate information on the safety of such products has not yet been established. Their campaign is focused on three themes:
1.GM organisms should not be released into the environment until adequate scientific evidence has been obtained about their safety to human health and to the environment.
2.Food products containing GM elements should be labeled, and GM foods should be physically separated from conventional foods.
3.Patents should not be issued to organisms that have been created by genetic engineering.
An important feature of the Greenpeace experience has always been the active involvement of volunteers in achieving the organization’s objectives. Some of the ways in which volunteers can participate are the following:
•Making financial donations to the organization
•Volunteering to participate in Greenpeace campaign, ranging from “licking envelopes to climbing smokestacks”
•Applying for employment with Greenpeace and putting to use some specific practical skill needed by the organization
•Taking a job on one of the three large and many smaller ships and boats used by the organization to carry out its campaigns
•Making personal lifestyle changes that will contribute to achieving the organization’s overall goals, such as changing any number of factors in one’s home, yard, office, and community
•Developing and carrying out a campaign of one’s own choosing on a local environmental problem of interest and concern to the community (see http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/getinvolved/for more details on ways of becoming involved)
Greenpeace relies to a considerable extent on the use of multimedia resources to get its message out to the general public. Its website has a number of photographs, photos essays, videos, slideshows, webcams, games, e-cards, and computer supplements to describe the problems in which it is interested and the programs it has developed to deal with those issues.
Institute for Responsible Technology
PO Box 469
Fairfield, IA 52556
Phone: (641) 209-1765
Fax: (888) 386-6075
Email: info@responsibletechnology.org
URL: http://www.responsibletechnology.org/
The Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT) was founded in 2003 by Jeffrey Smith, who calls himself “the leading consumer advocate promoting healthier non-GMO choices.” Smith is the author of two books on the subject, Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating and Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Smith created IRT as a mechanism for providing information about GM foods to the general public and to policy makers around the world. The organization studies risks posed by GM foods on human health, agriculture, the environment, and the economy. The organization relies for its research and analysis primarily on volunteers from a wide variety of fields including media experts, social network campaigners, writers, graphic designers, communications specialists, fundraisers, outreach professionals, and support staff. Some of these individuals work out of the organization’s main office in Fairfield, Iowa, whereas others work out of virtual offices throughout the United States.
A major focus of IRT’s work is education about GM foods, providing publications and essays on topics such as the genetic engineering process, GMOs in foods, health risks posed by GM foods, risks to agriculture and the environment, issues related to the use of genetically engineered hormones in dairy products, special risks of GM foods posed to children, and 10 reasons to avoid using GM foods. An important section of the organization’s website is devoted to the topic of alleged fraud by supporters of GM foods. The section purports to present the techniques used by pro-GM individuals and companies to make their case before the general public and decision makers, such as the use of rigged studies, the manipulation of data by pro-GM forces, the inadequacy of regulations dealing with GM crops and foods, and efforts that have been made to silence critics of the GM foods industry.
The institute also provides information for consumers about places and ways at and by which they can avoid encountering GM foods, with recommendations for places to buy non-GMO products, ways to determine whether restaurants are serving GMO products or not, and grocery stores and other purveyors of foods that are particularly sensitive to GM food issues. The organization also provides an iPhone app that can be used as a guide to the purchase of non-GMO products.
IRT sponsors a number of programs, campaigns, and other efforts to carry out its primary objectives. For example, the Tipping Point Network is a network of local activists who are committed to providing information about GMO products to their neighbors, local officials, and community organizations. The organization also provides tool kits specifically designed for parents, schools, and retailers, with information about GM foods and activities that can help people choose to purchase and eat non-GM products. IRT also has available a very wide selection of print and electronic resources on GM topics, including brochures and reports; a summary report called the State of the Science Report; a newsletter, Spilling the Beans; an archive of news reports about GM food topics; a list of speakers who are available to address GM food–related issues; and a number of audio and video programs on the topic.
Another especially helpful feature of the IRT website is a subbanner that displays sections of interest to specialized groups, such as consumers, health care providers, retailers, manufacturers, schools, parents, and individuals who are especially interested in the subject of autism. In 2012, the organization released a new film on GMO issues titled Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of Our Lives, which won the 2012 Movie of the Year award given by the Solari Report and the top Transformational Film of the Year award given by AwareGuide.
International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications
ISAAA SEAsiaCenter
Dr. Randy A. Hautea, Center Director and ISAAA
Global Coordinator
c/o IRRI
DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila
The Philippines
Phone: +63 2 845-0563/0569/0573
Fax: +63 49 536-7216; +63 2 845-0606
Email: seasiacenter@isaaa.org
ISAAA AfriCenter
Dr. Margaret Karembu, Director
PO Box 70
ILRI Campus, Old Naivasha Rd.
Uthiru, Nairobi 00605
Kenya
Phone: +254 20 4223618
Fax: +254 20 4223600
Email: africenter@isaaa.org
ISAAA AmeriCenter
Ms. Patricia Meenen, Business Administrator
105 Leland Laboratory
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: (607) 255-1724
Fax: (607) 255-1215
(notify office of incoming fax)
Email: americenter@isaaa.org
URL for ISAAA: http://www.isaaa.org
The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) is an international nonprofit organization established in 1992 for the purpose of providing technical information and tools related to agricultural biotechnology to poor and underserved farmers around the world. The organization’s objective is to make possible the transfer of this technology to farmers who would otherwise not have access to it as a way of achieving agricultural sustainability and development. ISAAA has three centers of operation: SEAsiaCenter, hosted by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines; ISAAA AfriCenter, hosted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) located in Nairobi, Kenya; and ISAAA AmeriCenter, hosted by Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Each center has additional specialized responsibilities. SEAsiaCenter also serves as the Global Coordination Office and the home of the Global Knowledge Center on Crop Biotechnology. AfriCenter is involved primarily with research on the tissue culture of bananas and rapid propagation of multipurpose trees. AmeriCenter also serves as the administrative and financial headquarters for ISAAA overall.
ISAAA is governed by a board of directors consisting of experts from around the world who are especially interested in developing agriculture systems that will help solve world hunger problems while protecting the natural environment. Current board members come from Brazil, Canada, China, India, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The organization’s work receives financial support from a number of private and governmental organizations and agencies such as the African Agricultural Technology Foundation; Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa; Bayer CropScience Ag; Cornell University; CropLife International; Fondazione Bussolera (Italy); Government of Kenya; Ibercaja (Spain); International Development Research Center of Canada; Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Pvt. Ltd (India); Monsanto; National Council for Science and Technology (Kenya); Department of Agriculture (Philippines); Economic Commission for Africa; United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; United States Department of Agriculture; U.S. Soybean Export Council; U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and Vibha Agrotech Pvt. Ltd (India).
ISAAA’s work is divided into four major categories: Knowledge Sharing Initiative, Technology Transfer Projects, Impact Assessment of Crop Biotechnology, and Support Projects. The Knowledge Sharing Initiative was developed primarily in response to requests from policy makers and program directors in Southeast Asia for ISAAA to develop ways of providing information about agricultural biotechnology developments for farmers in their area. That function is now handled primarily by the Global Knowledge Center on Crop Biotechnology, which provides information and assistance through technical articles, reports, updates on developments, and a variety of useful publications. Among the most important of these is the Biotech Information Directory, which lists more than 500 links to research institutes, universities, companies, sources of biotech information, and other directories specific to agricultural biotechnology and related fields. Another useful publication is the weekly Crop Biotech Update, which provides a summary of world developments in the field of agricultural biotechnology. The center also provides a list of courses, meetings, workshops, and other events of potential interest to individuals and organizations interested in agricultural biotechnology.
ISAAA’s Technology Transfer Projects have had a number of objectives, such as providing farmers with the tools to do diagnostic testing for specific plan diseases, learning how to develop transgenic crops with specific genetic characteristics, making use of molecular markers in crops, and designing plants with specific market applications. Impact studies are research attempts by ISAAA staff and colleagues to determine the economic, environmental, and social impact of agricultural biotechnology in specific areas. Some examples of studies of this type are research on the environmental impact of Bt eggplant in the Philippines, regulatory costs of commercializing papaya ringspot virus (PRSV) in the Philippines and Indonesia, effects on farm income and productivity of GM sweet potato in Kenya, and the economic impact of Bt corn in the Philippines.
The ISAAA Impact Assessment of Crop Biotechnology area of research involves using skills from the social sciences to measure the impact of crop biotechnology on factors such as economic surplus, agricultural productivity and income, human health and nutrition, and environmental effects of the technology. Previous research has focused on the impact of engineered papaya, banana, eggplant, corn, and sweet potato crops in areas such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
ISAAA’s Support Projects are programs conducted with other agencies (e.g., Cornell University and USAID) to move GM products along the pipeline from academic research to the marketplace. One such current program, the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSP II), is focusing on ways in which biotechnology products can be commercialized in east and west Africa, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Another of the ISAAA’s invaluable databases is its online GM Approval Database, which contains information on any GM crop that has been approved for use in nearly three dozen countries and the European Union. An interactive tool allows one, as just one example, to discover that three varieties of herbicide-tolerant (Roundup Ready) alfalfa are currently approved for use in eight countries around the world. The database also provides detailed information about the nature of the genetic modification that has been used in the plant and other relevant information about the product.
In addition to its regular print and electronic publications, ISAAA maintains a very useful blog on its website at http://isaaablog.blogspot.com/.
John D. Kemp (1940–)
Kemp and Timothy Hall headed a research team that, in 1983, found a way to insert a gene from one plant, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), into a second plant, the sunflower (Helianthus annuus), after which the gene was expressed as an apparently normal part of the sunflower’s genome. The experiment is of significance because it was the first time that the transfer of genes between two plants as the result of human intervention had been demonstrated, a procedure that provides the basis for much of the genetic engineering of plants conducted today. On August 10, 1981, Newsweek magazine ran a story about Kemp and Hall’s “sunbeam” plant as a harbinger of the future of plant biotechnology.
John Daniel Kemp was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 20, 1940. He attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), from which he received his BS in chemistry in 1962 and his PhD in biochemistry in 1965. He then remained at UCLA for postdoctoral studies from 1965 to 1968. Upon completing his postdoctoral studies, Kemp accepted an appointment as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he eventually became professor of plant pathology in 1977. During his tenure at Wisconsin, Kemp was concurrently a research chemist for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and vice president, head of microbiology, acting director, and associate director at the Agrigenetics Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.
In 1985, Kemp left Wisconsin to become professor of plant pathology and director of the Plant Genetic Engineering Laboratory at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. He retired from New Mexico State in 2002 and is currently professor emeritus at the university. Hall’s accomplishment is memorialized today with a plaque at the History of Genetics section of the Smithsonian Institution, in honor of the first plant-to-plant gene transfer in history.
Steve Lindow (1951–)
Lindow is a pioneer in the study of the ways in which bacteria are involved in the formation of ice crystals on plants. This process is responsible plant death caused by freezing temperatures. The ability to find ways of preventing these so-called ice-nucleating bacteria from acting on plants provides a mechanism for allowing those plants to survive low temperatures at which they would otherwise freeze. This research led to the development in the early 1980s of the first GM organism to be released into the environment, an ice-minus bacterium that was spread on a plot of strawberries. The experiment was conducted in December 1987 by the biotechnology company Advanced Genetic Sciences (AGS). Shortly thereafter, a similar experiment was conducted using ice-minus bacteria on potato seedlings. Both experiments were regarded as technical successes, suggesting a promising future for the use of GM bacteria to increase crop yields. Environmental groups took quite a different view, however, expressing concerns about possible harmful effects on other plants in the test area. Some members of these groups expressed their concerns by launching a guerilla attack on two test plots of strawberries and potatoes at Brentwood and Tule Lake, California, respectively, in 1988. They noted their objections to the experiments by simply tearing out all the plants being tested with the ice-minus bacteria.
Steven E. Lindow was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 20, 1951. He attended Oregon State University, in Corvallis, from which he earned a bachelor of science degree in botany in 1973. He then matriculated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he was awarded his PhD in plant pathology in 1977. His doctoral thesis dealt with the topic on which he was eventually to spend most of his academic career, the role of bacteria in the destruction of plants by frost formation.
After completing a year’s postdoctoral research at Wisconsin-Madison, he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of plant pathology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has remained at Berkeley ever since, with promotions to associate professor in 1983 and full professor in 1989, a post he continues to hold. The majority of his work has focused on ice-minus bacteria, a topic on which he has written more than 125 peer-reviewed papers and more than 70 book chapters, mini-reviews, and full books.
In addition to his academic research, Lindow has been involved in a variety of professional activities. For example, he was a member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Biotechnology Research Advisory Committee from 1988 to 1990, the Environment Protection Agency’s Subcommittee on Mitigation and Containment of Recombinant Organisms in 1989, the National Science Foundation Workgroup on Molecular Ecological Methods in 1985, the National Academy of Science Taskforce on Biological Control Research Needs and Priorities in Plant/Microbe Interactions in Agriculture in 1988, and the U.S. Department of Energy Workgroup on Molecular Methods in Ecology in 1991. He has also served on the Public and Scientific Affairs Board of the American Society for Microbiology (1988–1990); the Honors and Awards committee (1997–2000), Phyllosphere Microbiology committee (1989–1992 and 1998–2001), and Epidemiology committee (1995–1998) of the American Phytopathological Society; and the Scientific Board of the International Society for Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (2003 to present). He has also been organizer or co-organizer on a number of conferences on ice-nucleating bacteria, including the International Conferences on Biological Ice Nucleation held in San Francisco (1982); Flagstaff, Arizona (1984); Newport, Oregon (1987); Saskatoon, Canada (1989); and Madison, Wisconsin (1991).
Among Lindow’s many honors are the CIBA/Geigy and Ruth Allen awards of the American Phytopathological Society, election as fellow of that society in 1994, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, the Procter and Gamble award of the American Society for Microbiology, and election as fellow to the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, he was given a Distinguished Teaching Award by the College of Natural Resources at Berkeley.
Mark Lynas (1973–)
Mark Lynas is a journalist, photographer, author, and environmental activist who was actively involved in the anti-GM food movement in the late 1990s. Lynas remembers that he became involved in that movement after attending a small meeting of activists in Brighton led by Jim Thomas, a campaigns director for Greenpeace. Lynas reports that his first reaction to the stories Thomas had to tell was horror at the things that modern biotechnology companies were doing to the world’s food supplies. He came to the conclusion, he later said, that “[b]ig corporations were using more chemicals so that they could take over the food chain.”
He soon became increasingly active in the anti-GMO movement, taking part in “actions” at fields where new GM crops were being tested. His protest activities may have reached a zenith on April 29, 1998, when he took part in a sit-in at Monsanto’s offices at High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, England. His role in the action, he said, was that he “cased the joint, printed the leaflets and hired the buses.”
Even at this early point in his career of activism against GM products, he had begun to have second feelings about his participation in such campaigns. He reports that he was increasingly aware that his colleagues in protest had a tendency to ignore the best scientific evidence about GM products and hewed to preconceived notions about their effects on human health and the natural environment. Although he remained active in the anti-GMO movement for a number of years, he finally broke with his previous allies in March 2013. That break came in an address he made to the annual Oxford Farming Conference, a meeting of the world’s leading representatives of the agricultural community. It is regarded as a premier session of the members of the agriculture “establishment.” At the meeting, Lynas read a 5,000-word speech in which he apologized for having worked so hard in opposition to GM products and explained that he now realized he was wrong in his understanding and interpretation of the work of agricultural biotechnology firms like Monsanto. (It perhaps goes without saying that Lynas’s speech became the focus of a vigorous exchange of views between pro- and anti-GM activists.)
Mark Lynas was born in Fiji and then traveled with his family to Peru, Spain, and the United Kingdom. He attended the University of Edinburgh, from which he received his degree in history and politics. His father was a geologist who worked on mapping projects for the government, which activity was responsible for Lynas’s earliest interests in climate-change issues. He describes a trip to his family’s home in 2000 during which they looked at photographs taken 20 years earlier, when his father was mapping on the remote eastern side of the Cordillera Blanca, Peru’s highest range. The dominant feature of these photographs was an enormous glacier in one of the region’s valleys. When his father observed that the glacier was probably decreasing in size because of global warming, Lynas decided to set off on a world journey to collect evidence of the way climate change was affecting Earth features. In 2002, he completed that journey by returning to the Cordillera Blanca, where he found that the glacier in his father’s photographs had completely disappeared. That discovery only confirmed Lynas’s decision to devote his career to the campaign to work for the reduction of greenhouse gases and further global warming.
The result of that commitment has been a number of articles, speeches, books, films, and other productions that describe the risks posed by global climate change, the reasons for that process, and the steps that must be taken to reverse the process. The most important of those works are his books High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis (Picador 2004), in which he provides before-and-after pictures of the effect of climate change on geographic features, taken during his 2000–2002 trip around the world; Gem Carbon Counter (Collins 2007), a resource that shows how one can calculate one’s own carbon footprint and how it can be changed; Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (National Geographic 2007), in which Lynas provides verbal and photographic descriptions of the effects of one-, two-, three-, four-, five-, and six-degree increases in the planet’s annual average temperature; and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (National Geographic 2011), in which he describes the threat that human life now poses to other plants and animals on Earth.
In addition to his books, Lynas has contributed to a collection of essays on environmental issues, Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World (Collins 2006); been involved in the production of a film called The Age of Stupid, set in 2055 and showing the long-term effects of global climate change; and contributed regularly to a number of major newspapers and magazines, including Ecologist, Geographical, Granta, the Guardian New Statesman, and the Observer.
(Quotations in this article are taken from Will Storr, “Mark Lynas: Truth, Treachery and GM Food,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/09/mark-lynas-truth-treachery-gm, accessed on December 9, 2013, and Mark Lynas, “Vanishing Worlds,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/mar/31/environment.environment,accessed on December 9, 2013.)
Monsanto
800 N. Lindbergh Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63167
Phone: (314) 694-1000
Email: http://www.monsanto.com/whoweare/Pages/contact-us.aspx
Monsanto is a large, publicly traded, multinational chemical and agricultural biotechnology company. Its name is probably more closely associated with research on and the development of agricultural biotechnology products of any company in the world. It is seen by many people as having made enormous contributions to the development of new agricultural products and, therefore, contributing to the solution of some of the world’s most serious problems (e.g., widespread hunger). Other people argue that it has caused more problems for the world’s agricultural systems and for human nutrition than any existing corporation. The company’s record is so extensive and expansive that no such generalized statement can reasonably summarize its historic and current achievements.
The Monsanto Company was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, a native of Chicago who had been working in the pharmaceutical industry since the age of 12. Queeny took his wife’s maiden name as the name for his new company. The first product made by the company was saccharin, a widely popular artificial sweetener, which it sold to the Coca-Cola company and to the manufacturers of canned food products. Over the years, the company diversified and expanded the variety of products it manufactured, adding the raw material salicylic acid, aspirin, and vanillin, as well as a number of chemicals used in the processing of natural rubber. It later added one of the most important of all raw chemicals for industrial processes, sulfuric acid, as well as a class of very popular industrial chemicals known as the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were later to be associated with a variety of human health problems.
Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, and through its own research, Monsanto eventually added the personnel, technology, and facilities to extend even further the variety of products it made, which eventually include such items as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), artificial dopamine (a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease), acetic acid (an essential raw material for a variety of industrial chemical syntheses), and AstroTurf (a plastic material used on athletic fields, home lawns, and other settings in place of natural grass).
In the early 1980s, Monsanto began to focus on the development and production of GM seeds, crops, and foods. A key step in this decision was the purchase of an agricultural biotechnology company called Agracetus (founded in 1981 under the name Cetus). Agracetus had focused on the development of technology for the production of genetically transformed organisms (including the production of a “gene gun” used to fire transformed genes into host cells). Agracetus also developed the first successful genetically engineered crop, Roundup Ready soybean, which it made available commercially in 1991. Today, the Agracetus Campus of the Monsanto Company is located on a 4.5-acre site in Middleton, Wisconsin, with a staff of more than 21,000 employees.
Agracetus is only one of many Monsanto subsidiaries. Other specialized divisions are Asgrow, a seed production and marketing company specializing in research on soybeans, maize, and sorghum; Calgene, specializing in herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant crops; DeKalb Genetics, the world’s second largest seed company; First Line Seed, which sells soybean seeds primarily; EID Parry, an Indian producer of cotton seeds; Monsoy, the largest producer and seller of soybean seeds in Brazil; and Plant Breeding International Cambridge, Ltd, a British firm that specializes in research on grass seeds, potatoes, barley, wheat, and rapeseed. Monsanto’s revenue for all its operations in 2013 was $14.9 billion.
The controversy over Monsanto’s activities is too complex to be discussed in this short article. Two pieces of datum reflect the range of this controversy. In 2009, the business journal Forbes named Monsanto its Company of the Year for its enormous success during a period of economic recession in the United States and the world (see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/americas-best-company-10-gmos-dupont-planet-versus-monsanto.html). Only a year later, the Swiss company Covalence, which ranks companies on the basis of their business ethics, placed Monsanto last on its list of 581 international corporations (see http://web.archive.org/web/20100610062335/http://www.covalence.ch/index.php/ethical-rankings/across-sectors).
Non-GMO Project
1200 Harris Ave., Suite #305
Bellingham, WA 98225
Phone: (877) 358-9240
Fax: (866) 272-8710
Email: info@nongmoproject.org
URL: http://www.nongmoproject.org
The Non-GMO Project was born in 2005, when two grocery stores, The Natural Grocery Company in Berkeley, California, and The Big Carrot Natural Food Market in Toronto, Canada, combined to develop a standard definition for GM foods that could be used in their own buying and selling activities. This move grew out of a common experience in both stores in which customers were increasingly interested in knowing which products contained GM elements and which did not. The stores both discovered that responding to customers’ concerns was especially difficult because there was no widely accepted meaning as to what it meant for a product to be a GMO food. The new organization eventually accomplished its goal through a cooperative effort with the Global ID Group, whose work is involved with the testing and certification of non-GMO foods.
Identification and promotion of foods that do not contain GM components is still a major part of the Non-GMO Project’s work. Its website, for example, provides lists of food products, restaurants, and retailers who guarantee that all their products are completely natural and contain no GM components. A visitor to the website can click on the appropriate button and find extensive lists of businesses in each category that it can trust as a supplier of non-GMO products. The organization also has a verification process in place that allows a food supplier, restaurant, or food retailer to apply for approval as a non-GMO industry.
Another aspect of the Non-GMO Project’s work is community involvement. Individuals and businesses are encouraged to become involved in the effort to identify and distinguish GM foods in a variety of ways, ranging from supplying recipes that do not involve the use of GM products to participation in the Non-GMO month activities to organizing or participating in a variety of activities designed to promote the goals of the Non-GMO Project.
Retailers are a special target of the organization’s activities also. The Retailer Toolkit includes activities such as a quarterly newsletter with articles relevant to the sale of non-GM foods by retailers; webinars designed specifically for retailers interested in handling non-GM foods; so-called shelf talkers, which are tags that highlight the availability on shelves of foods that contain no GM components; a FAQ trifold that contains basic facts about GM foods in a brightly illustrated and interesting format; a statement of policies about non-GMO food products; and a plan for connected retailers with the parent organization and with each other.
Non-GMO Project also has a special outreach to members of the food industry, whom it works with and encourages to promote the production and distribution of non-GM foods. Access to the food industry page on the organization’s website is password protected, allowing direct access from a specific industry member directly to the organization itself.
The issue of food labeling is also a matter of major concern to the organization. It provides information on the status of current efforts throughout the United States to require the labeling of GM foods and food products, and it offers suggestions and materials for use by individuals who are interested in participating in the food labeling campaign in their own state and community.
The News and Events section of the organization’s website provides a guide to forthcoming events at restaurants, food suppliers, and food producers associated with the organization. A recent listing of events, for example, mentioned the official verification recently received by a bakery, approval of certain specific non-GMO foods at another bakery, and the awarding of a seal of approval for its products to a food supplement company.
Organic Consumers Association
6771 South Silver Hill Dr.
Finland, MN 55603
Phone: (218) 226-4164
Fax: (218) 353-7652
Email: http://www.organicconsumers.org/aboutus.cfm#contact
URL: http://www.organicconsumers.org/
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is a nonprofit, online, grassroots, public interest 501(c)3 organization whose mission is to promote health, justice, and sustainability. The organization was founded in 1998 in response to a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to establish a set of regulations for organic food to which many food producers objected. A number of growers, distributors, and consumers of organic foods concluded that the proposed USDA regulations would dramatically degrade the quality of products sold under the rubric of “organic,” and they organized a massive protest that produced more than 280,000 letters and emails complaining about the USDA decision. The organization has continued to grow since then and now claims a worldwide membership of over 850,000 individuals. Included among these members are thousands of natural food and organic grocery stores, markets, and other retail outlets, as well as producers and consumers of such products. Some of the other organizations affiliated with OCA are the National Coalition against the Misuse of Pesticides, Consumers Union, Native Forest Council of Oregon, Ashland Community Food Store (Ashland, Oregon), Network for Safe & Secure Food and Environment (Japan), Family Farm Defenders of Wisconsin, and Research Foundation for Science, Technology, & Natural Resource Policy (India).
A major feature of OCA’s program is a six-point Organic Agenda 2005–2015 that calls for
1.The conversion of American agriculture to at least 30 percent organic products by 2015
2.A free trade approach to the distribution of food, in contrast to the existing system controlled by large multinational corporations
3.A global moratorium on genetically engineered crops and foods
4.A phase-out of the most dangerous industrial agriculture and factory farming practices
5.Universal health care for all Americans, with an emphasis on better nutrition, preventive health care, and wellness programs
6.Energy independence with vastly increased emphasis on the use of alternative and renewable energy sources
A major feature of OCA’s work is its Take Action program, in which the organization encourages members and friends to become involved in specific activities related to its overall mission. Some recent Take Action alerts involved opposition to a federal bill that would prohibit state anti-GMO laws and regulations; letter writing to two U.S. senators expressing opposition to voluntary (but not mandatory) labeling of GM foods; action to have the use of the antibiotic streptomycin banned from use with organic apples and pears; speaking out against membership of certain organizations and individuals in the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), which has been involved in actions against state laws for the labeling of GM products; letter writing to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in opposition to the approval of GM foods; lobbying of national representatives and senators in opposition to the proposed Farmers Assurance Provision, also known by its opponents as the Monsanto Protection Act; and expressions of opposition to new trade bills that are in conflict with OCA’s stand on free trade.
The OCA website is also a gold mine of information on current events worldwide related to organic farming and related issues. In a recent posting, that website contained feature stories on the French government’s initiative to double land devoted to organic farming by 2017, the signing of a bill prohibiting the farming of GM crops on the Big Island of Hawaii, the advantages of grass-fed food animals over “factory-farmed” animals, the latest news on a controversial study on the health effects of GM food by Belgian researchers Gilles Eric Séralini, and recommendations for a variety of foods with supposedly significant nutritional advantages, such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and kale.
The OCA website also has a very extensive listing of “green” businesses, ranging from buying clubs and organic snacks to holistic dentists and chiropractors to outdoor furniture and appliances. For individuals with an interest in organic crops and foods, the association also provides a variety of electronic newsletter with current news about events in the field, Organic Bytes (http://www.organicconsumers.org/organicbytes.cfm).
A section of the website is also a useful resource for a variety of topics relating to genetic engineering, such as pages on rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), the Millions against Monsanto campaign, issues related to cloning and patenting of life forms, the nature and applications of nanotechnology, progress in the development of GM wheat, and research on GM fish.
Ingo Potrykus (1933–)
Nutrition experts recommend a varied diet consisting of vegetables and fruits, as well as animal and dairy products for the maintenance of good health. For millions of people around the world, however, such a diet is next to impossible. Many of those people rely almost entirely on a restricted diet of grains, such as corn or rice, with a limited supply of other nutritional foods. Lacking the complete diet needed to maintain good health, many people are susceptible to nutritional disorders, as well as being at increased risk for infectious diseases. These health problems can lead to a number of disabling and even fatal disorders that account for high morbidity and mortality rates in developing countries around the world.
Researchers have been working for decades on ways of resolving this basic problem of world nutrition. One of the most promising solutions devised thus far has been the invention of GM foods that contain nutrients not found in the normal basic diet of individuals who cannot afford or do not have access to a diet of healthy natural foods. A leader in this researcher has long been Ingo Potrykus, a coinventor, with German biologist Peter Beyer, of the GM food known as Golden Rice. Golden Rice is a form of the crop that has been engineered to contain the provitamin known as β-carotene, or provitamin A. A provitamin is a substance that is converted within the human body into the vitamin of the same name. Thus, provitamin A is converted in the body to vitamin A, a substance known to strengthen the human immune system in general and, more specifically, to protect against diseases of the eye that can result in blindness. According to some estimates, as many as a half-million children worldwide die each year as a result of vitamin A deficiency disorders. By genetically modifying the food that many of those children eat as a cornerstone of their daily diets—rice—Potrykus and Beyer created a mechanism for saving hundreds of thousands of lives each year. The presence of the orange-colored β-carotene in the engineered rice accounts for the golden color of the product, and hence its name.
Ingo Potrykus was born in Hirschberg im Riesengebirge, Germany, on December 5, 1933. He attended the universities of Erlangen and Cologne, where he studied biochemistry, botany, genetics, philosophy, physical education, and zoology. He received his PhD in plant genetics from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne in 1968. He then accepted an appointment as assistant professor at the Institute of Plant Physiology at Stuttgart–Hohenheim, where he served from 1970 to 1974 before becoming group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Genetic at Ladenburg–Heidelberg from 1974 to 1976. He then assumed a similar post at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, from 1976 to 1986. During his stay in Basel, Potrykus received his habilitation in botany from the University of Basel (1982). The habilitation degree is the highest honor given to an academic in Europe and some other parts of the world. It is awarded to a person with a PhD degree who has extended his or her research to a higher level that leads to life-long tenured positions in his or her field. In 1986, Potrykus received such an appointment when he was named full professor of plant sciences at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), a post he held until his retirement in 1999.
Potrykus and Beyer began their research on Golden Rice in the late 1980s and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1993 to carry out a seven-year project on the development of the product. Since his retirement in 1999, Potrykus has continued to work on the engineered crop through the International Humanitarian Golden Rice Board, where he has served as president. His objective, and that of the board, is to make available the fruits of their research on Golden Rice to people living in impoverished nations where rice is the primary component of a person’s diet, such as China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Potrykus has authored more than 340 scientific papers on Golden Rice and been awarded 30 patents for the product. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (2000), the American Society of Plant Biologists Leadership in Science Public Service Award (2001), the Crop Science of America President’s Award and European Culture Award in Science (2002), and the Bertebos Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (2007). He was also given an honorary doctorate by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in 2002 and by the University of Freiburg in 2007. He was also named the most influential scientist in the area of agricultural, industrial, and environmental biotechnology for the decade 1995–2005 by the readers of the journal Nature Biotechnology in 2006 and was featured on the cover of Time magazine on July 31, 2000, as someone whose work could “save a million kids a year.” Potrykus has also been honored by election to a number of prestigious societies, including Academia Europaea, the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Academia Bibliotheca Alexandria, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the World Technology Network.
Maxine Singer (1931–)
In a biographical sketch of Singer, the National Library of Medicine has noted that “[d]uring the early 1970s, as debate over the environmental and health risks of the new technology of gene recombination grew ever more heated, Maxine Singer was a leading voice of prudence, patience, and dedication to balancing scientific principles and public welfare.” The period called for just such an outlook on new research on genetic engineering. Only a few years earlier, the work of Arthur Kornberg, Gobind Khorana, Paul Berg, Herbert Boyer, Stanley N. Cohen, and others had shown that it was possible to modify the DNA of an organism, opening a new line of research that scientists could hardly have imagined only a few decades earlier. And it was clear to those scientists that the modifications they were now able to make could potentially produce revolutionary changes in human society. They were confronted with the challenge of finding ways of going forward with this research, gaining the greatest amount of new information from it, without placing human health or the natural environment at risk. It was a difficult and challenging balancing act on which Singer was to make as important contributions as anyone else in the field.
Maxine Frank Singer was born in New York City on February 15, 1931, to Henrietta (née Perlowitz) Frank, a hospital admissions officer, children’s camp director, and model, and Hyman Frank, an attorney. She attended public schools in Brooklyn, where she developed an interest in science early in life. She has credited her high school chemistry teacher with encouraging her to continue her studies in the field when she matriculated at Swarthmore College, from which she received her bachelor’s degree in 1952. Singer then continued her studies at Yale University, which granted her a PhD in biochemistry in 1957. Although her doctoral studies at Yale focused on protein chemistry, she soon became fascinated by the newly important subject of nucleic acids. (Watson and Crick had announced the chemical structure of the DNA molecule in 1953.)
Upon graduation, Singer looked for a laboratory where she could pursue her own research on nucleic acids. One of the few options then available in the United States was the laboratory run by Leon Heppel at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at Bethesda, Maryland. Heppel hired Singer to join his team at the laboratory of biochemistry in the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases (later renamed the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases [NIAMDD]). Singer was hired as a postdoctoral fellow in spite of the fact that she had not officially received her doctorate from Yale. Two years later, she was appointed to a regular full-time position at NIAMDD, where she remained until 1974.
The mid-1970s were a period of discussion and debate about the potential impacts of recombinant DNA research on human health and the natural environment. That debate reached a critical point at a 1973 session of the annual Gordon Conference, a highly regarded series of meetings on current scientific topics that always attracts leaders in the field of physical, biological, mathematical, and social sciences. Singer cochaired a session on current research on DNA, and attendees at the session discussed possible social consequences of this line of research. They recommended writing a letter that would be published in the journal Science calling for a meeting of researchers in the field to get closer attention to this problem. Singer was one of the authors and signers of that letter, and she went on to become one of the organizers of that meeting, the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, held at Asilomar State Park, California, in February 1975.
In 1974, Singer left NIAMDD to accept a new position at NIH as chief of the Section on Nucleic Acid Enzymology at the Division of Cancer Biology and Diagnosis (DCBD) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Six years later, she was promoted to chief of the DCBD Laboratory of Biochemistry, a post she held until 1988. She then accepted appointment as president of the Carnegie Institution, one of the nation’s most prestigious research institutions, in Washington, DC. She retired from Carnegie in 2002. During her tenure at Carnegie, she retained her affiliation with NCI, where she continued her research on human genetics.
Singer’s work has been recognized with a number of awards and honors. She has been given honorary degrees by Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, Swarthmore College, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Williams College, and Yale University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, the National Academy of Sciences in 1979, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1986. She was given the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan and the National Medal of Science in 1992 by President Bill Clinton. The citation accompanying the National Medal noted that it was given for Singer’s “outstanding scientific accomplishments and her deep concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist.”
Singer married fellow research Daniel Morris Singer in 1952. They have four grown children.
Marc van Montagu (1933–)
GM organisms are synthesized by inserting the DNA from some organism, or artificially produced DNA, into the cells of a host organism. Under the proper conditions, DNA in the host cell takes up the introduced DNA to form a hybrid product that consists of the host DNA and introduced DNA. A key challenge faced by genetic researchers, then, is to find a way of producing this hybrid DNA by cutting the host DNA and pasting in the foreign DNA.
During the 1970s, a number of research teams around the world were attempting to solve this problem. In the early 1980s, a breakthrough occurred almost simultaneously in two laboratories, one led by Mary-Dell Chilton, originally at the University of Washington, and Marc van Montagu, then at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. These discoveries eventually became the basis for the technology by which the vast majority of genetically engineered organisms are produced today.
Marc van Montagu was born in Ghent, Belgium, on November 10, 1933. He attended Ghent University, from which he received his MSc in chemistry and organic chemistry in 1955 and his PhD in organic chemistry and biochemistry in 1965. During the period from 1956 to 1960, van Montagu worked as director of the Bureau of Studies at the Technical School for the Nuclear Industry. Over his academic career, van Montagu divided his time among three academic appointments, as part-time professor at the Free University of Brussels (until 1989), full professor of molecular genetics at the University of Ghent (until 1999), and director of the Department of Genetics at the Flanders Institute of Biochemistry (until 1999).
In 1982, van Montagu drew on his experience with and discoveries in genetic engineering to create a new company, Plant Genetics Systems, Inc. (PGS), to bring those discoveries into commercial realization. The company was a joint venture between European investors and Advanced Genetic Systems, of Oakland, California. Van Montagu served as scientific director and a member of the board of directors of PGS until 1996. PGS was acquired by the German company AgroEvo in 1995 and was later absorbed by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis. In 1998, van Montagu founded a second biotechnology company, CropDesign, which was acquired in 1996 by BASF Plant Science.
Throughout his career, van Montagu has held a number of additional scientific research and consulting posts that include chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Danforth Center, St. Louis; member of the Science Board of the Alellyx corporation, São Paulo; biotechnology advisor to the International Center for Agriculture Research in Dry and Arid Areas (ICARDA), Aleppo, Syria; member of the Board of Governors and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel; member of the Science Advisory Committee of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Heraklion, Crete; member of the International Advisory Board at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; member of the Board of Directors of the Avesthagen biotechnology company, Bangalore, India; and scientific advisor to the biotechnology firms Tibotech (Belgium) and Extracta (Brazil).
Van Montagu has been honored with a number of awards and prizes, including the Theodor Bücher Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies; Genome Valley Excellence Award, presented by BioAsia, India; the Rank Prize for Nutrition; the IBM-Europe Prize; the Charles Leopold Mayer Prize of the Academy of Sciences, France; the Dr. A. de Leeuw–Damry–Bourlart Prize of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research; the Japan Prize; and the World Food Prize, in 2013. The last of these awards is widely considered to be one of the highest honors awarded to food scientists in the world, accompanied by a $250,000 cash award (shared among three winners in 2013). He has been elected to a number of honorary societies, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Academia Europea, Agricultural Academy of Russia, Academy of Engineering of Sweden, Agricultural Academy of France, Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, Italian Academy of Sciences dei XL, American Academy of Microbiology, and Third World Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Helsinki, Compiegne, Rio de Janeiro, Liege, Brussels, Habana, and Sofia.
Although officially retired from his academic appointments in 1999, van Montagu has remained active in GM food-related work. In 2000, for example, he founded the Institute of Plant Biotechnology Outreach to assist developing countries with the implementation of latest research in the genetic engineering of organisms and to encourage research in the field in their own countries.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is a division of the United Nations, the first specialized agency of the United Nations created during its founding in San Francisco in July 1946. All 61 nations present at that conference signed not only the founding documents of the United Nations but also the new constitution of the WHO. The organization formally became operational on April 7, 1948, also designated as the first World Health Day, after the 26th member state signed the ratification documents for the organization.
WHO currently consists of 194 member states, each of whom sends delegates to the World Health Assembly, which meets yearly to set overall policy for the group. That policy is carried out on a day-to-day basis by a director-general and 34-member executive board, chosen by the assembly. Much of the ongoing work of the organization is carried out through WHO’s regional offices in the Brazzaville, Congo (Africa), Washington, DC (Americas), Cairo (Eastern Mediterranean), Copenhagen (Europe), New Delhi (Southeast Asia), and Manila (Western Pacific). The agency’s home office is in Geneva.
Every six years, WHO establishes a global health plan that focuses on some large-scale health issue to which the organization will give major attention over the ensuing period. For the period 2008–2013, that health plan was directed at the prevention and control of four noncommunicable diseases—cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, and chronic respiratory diseases—and four shared risk factors—tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, and the harmful use of alcohol (see http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2009/9789241597418_eng.pdf). For the period 2014–2019, the health plan focused on the prevention of avoidable blindness and visual impairment (see http://www.who.int/blindness/Zerodraftactionplan2014-19.pdf).
In addition to this single large-scale effort, WHO has a myriad number of specific health problems to which it devotes its energy and with which it works in partnership with member states. Some of those topics are accountability for women’s and children’s health, African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control, aging and life course, blood products and related biologicals, blood transfusion safety, child growth standards, children’s environmental health, climate change and human health, diagnostic imaging, dracunculiasis, essential medicines for children, food safety, gender, women and health, health and human rights, HIV/AIDS, household water treatment and safe storage, immunization financing, leprosy elimination, malaria, occupational health, prevention of deafness and hearing impairment, social determinants of health, transplantation, vaccine safety, and water sanitation and health. The organization devotes a section of its website to information about biotechnology, which includes information on GM foods and the controversy that surrounds their use and labeling.
One of WHO’s most important functions is the production of a large range of publications on virtually every possible health topic. These publications are led by a group of peer-reviewed and specialized journals in health science that include the monthly journal, Bulletin of the World Health Organization; the Weekly Epidemiological Record; the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal; the WHO South-East Asia Journal of Public Health; Western Pacific Surveillance and Response; and WHO Drug Information. Publications also include reports and reference books on a wide range of health topics, such as the annual World Health Report, a document that summarizes the status of health status in member nations; World Health Statistics, an annual compilation of data from the organization’s member states; International Travel and Health, a publication on health risks for international travelers, vaccination requirements, and precautions to take; International Health Regulations, a listing of public health regulations that are legally binding on WHO member states; The International Classification of Diseases, the international standard diagnostic classification for epidemiological and health management purposes; and International Pharmacopoeia, a collection of quality specifications for pharmaceutical substances and dosage forms. WHO also publishes an extensive collection of reports, reviews, statistical information, guidelines, and other documents for each of its six regions. A complete list of all WHO publications is available on the organization’s website at http://apps.who.int/bookorders/anglais/home1.jsp?sesslan=1.
WHO also collects, collates, archives, and distributes statistical information on virtually every health issue of concern today. These data cover topics such as mortality and morbidity estimates, health systems, the health workforce, health financing, noncommunicable diseases, infectious diseases, road safety, substance abuse, and women’s health issues.
Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch carries a box containing public comments opposing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of genetically engineered salmon before speaking at an FDA veterinary medicine advisory committee hearing on modified salmon in Rockville, Maryland on September 20, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)