Archive for October, 2015
GMO’s in the News
GMO’s in the News
Some interesting articles in the news this month.
The first, which I am very happy about, is that the Federation of German Scientists Whistleblower Award was given to Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini. Monsanto and the other biotech companies smeared him after his rat study demonstrated the toxic effects of Roundup. Glad to see he’s getting supported from the European scientific community.
Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini has been honoured with the 2015 Whistleblower Award by the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) and the German Section of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (“IALANA”).
Prof Séralini received the award in recognition of his research demonstrating the toxic effects of Roundup herbicide on rats when administered at a low environmentally relevant dose over a long-term period. After the research was published, Prof Séralini was attacked in what the VDW and IALANA call “a vehement campaign by ‘interested circles’ from the chemical industry” as well as from the UK Science Media Centre. This smear campaign led to the retraction of his team’s paper by the first journal that published it. But Prof Séralini and his team fought back, countering the scientific arguments raised against their research and republishing their paper in another journal.
While Prof Séralini’s study was not a carcinogenicity study but a long-term toxicity study, the carcinogenic potential of Roundup was confirmed this year when the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC published its verdict that glyphosate herbicides are “probable” human carcinogens.
Read more here:
GM Crops Now Banned in 38 Countries Worldwide – Sustainable Pulse Research
Sort of negates all the US biotech lies, doesn’t it…
Following the recent green wave of genetically modified (GM) crop cultivation bans across the European Union, Sustainable Pulse decided to research which countries have decided to officially ban the cultivation of GM crops around the Globe.
This research has led to the discovery that there is a growing swell of government level support worldwide for bans on GM crop cultivation for both health and environmental reasons.
Thirty eight (38) countries worldwide have officially banned the cultivation of GM crops and only 28 actually grow GM crops. The picture painted by the Biotech industry and the U.S. government that GM crops have been accepted by the majority of countries worldwide is therefore quite obviously wrong.
In fact many countries have recently started to put in place regulations to protect their population and environment from the environmental and health damage caused by GM crops.
Read more here:
Study Exposes AquaBounty’s Bogus Growth Claims on GMO Salmon
For those of you who have read the Mary Shelley novel “Frankenstein,” you remember that the name refers to the scientist Victor Frankenstein, not the monster he constructed from body parts found in the local cemetery. The story has captured the public’s imagination for nearly 200 years, and “franken” has become a common prefix—and a pejorative—for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are made with cut-and-pasted genetic material from different species of plants, animals and microorganisms.
GMO salmon—or franken-fish, as it is sometimes called—is an Atlantic salmon whose DNA has been re-engineered with a “growth-hormone gene construct” made from genetic material of other fish. One of these fish, the ocean pout, is only as closely related to Atlantic salmon, taxonomically speaking, as a human is related to a porcupine or a platypus. This recombination of genetic material would never happen in nature.
Beyond being designed and engineered by humans and created in a laboratory, GMO salmon and Frankenstein’s monster may also share another defining feature—larger-than-normal proportions. AquaBounty Technologies, the company behind GMO salmon, has always insisted that its fish grow much faster than normal Atlantic salmon—but not larger. This is one of the most frequent claims the company makes—to journalists and even to financial regulators at the Securities Exchange Commission.
But, according to a recently released scientific review from the Canadian government, AquaBounty doesn’t have a shred of evidence supporting this claim. This is more than a little odd because AquaBounty calls GMO salmon the “most studied fish in the world.”
If it turns out that GMO salmon do grow larger than normal salmon, it would almost certainly provoke even further consumer opposition to the fish while also compromising the company’s pending risk assessment with the FDA. As Canadian government scientists note, a larger-than-normal Atlantic salmon would be able to eat larger-than-normal prey fish, and this expanded diet could expand the environmental impact of escaped GMO salmon.
Other important risk-assessment questions also emerge: What happens to the health of a GMO salmon that reaches ever-large proportions? What happens to the nutritional content of the fish for consumers? What happens to the hormone levels of this fish, which is engineered with a growth-hormone gene construct?
Read more here:
http://ecowatch.com/2015/10/22/gmo-salmon-aquabounty-claims/