Des Moines Register
05-13-07
Book's theories about genetically engineered food short on science
By PAUL CHRISTENSEN
SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER
In "Genetic Roulette," Jeffrey Smith asserts there is a sort of conspiracy between
industry and government biotech regulatory agencies to hide scientific concerns
about the safety of genetically engineered food.
Smith provides a useful list of the health concerns with observations to support
them. Based on the identified concerns, he provides arguments that government
regulation is inadequate and regulators are unduly influenced by the agricultural
biotechnology industry. He rejects the competence of industry scientists to do the
safety studies in the approval of biotech products. He then provides a refutation
of the arguments supporting biotech safety and concludes that customers,
without even considering the usefulness of genetically engineered foods, reject
them and force regulators to address the inadequacies in the evaluation of
biotech safety.
Scientific activity consists of a body of knowledge that has been confirmed by
experiment, and the search for patterns in observations that are not explained.
"Genetic Roulette" offers observations suggesting possible patterns and theories
that might explain some of those observations.
But the diversity of the observations and explanations undermine the assertion of
science-based concern. Science is looking for a pattern that consistently repeats.
He instead gives us new patterns in the data that erode rather than reinforce the
notion that one of them might be something more than just anecdote,
coincidence and the expected 5 percent outliers that pop up in experiments with
many variables.
Regulators use proven science. Smith refers to this as "assumption-based safety
assessment," because it "assumes" current scientific consensus is right. "Genetic
Roulette" asserts they should act on notions of possible harm that are not yet
established and that our basic assumption should be that existing scientific
consensus is wrong and government regulators should actively seek to attack the
conventional science. This is not what regulators normally do.
Existing scientific understanding is incomplete, but regulators do not decide on
what to test based on the notion that any remote possibility must be tested and
rejected. They compare possible phenomena and test the ones that seem to
present the highest risk based on current consensus science and some
assessment of where scientific consensus might be going.
"Genetic Roulette" contributes little because it does not sort out the patterns and
how they are linked to plausible causes. Smith is trying to convince the public to
support an across-the-board rejection of all genetically engineered products,
based as much on the original assumption of conspiracy between the regulators
and industry as on the science.
There is a large body of thought asserting the West has gone wrong and the
modern analytical world is inherently plagued with the unintended consequences
of our technological choices. From this perspective, government and business
share a faulty world-view based on technological analysis that must inevitably
produce bad decisions. Analysis-based errors are possible, but rejecting the
analytical approach leads to interminable arguments about unconfirmed patterns
in data that will keep us from addressing larger safety concerns.
PAUL CHRISTENSEN is Seed Technology and Business Curriculum
Manager at Iowa State University.