[National Academy of Sciences press release]
Techniques for confining genetically engineered organisms are still in their infancy, and far more work needs to be done to make sure new organisms under development don't taint the human food supply or wipe out important species, a National Research Council panel said today.
Most attempts to control potentially hazardous, gene-altered organisms have involved physically segregating them, but those efforts have already proven susceptible to failure, including human error. Scientists have invested considerable hope in newer technologies that might impose biological limits on the spread of genetic material from altered organisms like fish, insects and some crops. Scores of genetically engineered organisms of this sort are under development in the nation's laboratories, offering numerous potential benefits -- and many perils.
But the most promising methods of "bioconfinement" are still in the early research stages, and no available method offers complete assurance that new organisms could be kept under control, the panel said today in a report commissioned by the Agriculture Department, which is charged with regulating many aspects of genetic engineering.
"What they seem to suggest is the science for creating risky organisms exists, but we don't have the methods for safely confining them yet," said Gregory Jaffe, director of biotechnology programs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington. "The sad conclusion from the report is that there really aren't any viable bioconfinement methods that could be adopted commercially without significant additional research and testing."
Jaffe's organization is a consumer group that supports genetic engineering in principle but has often criticized federal oversight of it. He was one of the few people in Washington who had read the 219-page report before its official release this afternoon.
Given the imperfect control methods available today, the National Research Council panel recommended that companies and laboratories contemplating the release of potentially hazardous organisms into the environment adopt an "integrated confinement system" that includes at least two distinct techniques. The plans should factor in the likelihood of human error, the panel said, adding that confinement had often seemed to be an "afterthought" in genetic-engineering research.
If widely adopted, that idea would impose new costs and burdens on the American biotechnology industry. While emphasizing its commitment to safety, the industry has generally opposed elaborate control methods for gene-altered organisms, saying the risks have often been exaggerated and the potential benefits under-appreciated.
Indeed, the new report said the techniques of genetic engineering promise to improve the food supply, help control disease and offer many other benefits. "Agricultural biotechnology has enormous potential to better the human condition," panel chairman T. Kent Kirk, professor emeritus of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, said in an introduction. But as scientists design ever-more-exotic organisms -- ranging from corn that produces pharmaceuticals in its kernels to fish that grow 10 or 20 times faster than normal -- the risk will rise that altered genes could spread to unwanted locales, threatening the ecology or the food supply, the report said.
That nearly happened in 2002, when human error allowed corn designed to produce a pig vaccine to spread too widely in fields in Iowa and Nebraska. Expensive, last-minute intervention by the Agriculture Department kept the product out of the food supply, and the department has since been tightening its regulations. Some advocates of genetic engineering have charged that regulation has already become excessive and threatens to choke off one of the nation's most promising new industries, while environmental and some consumer groups assert that the government hasn't cracked down enough.
The new report was commissioned before the corn incident, but it has taken on added importance in light of that near-miss. The National Research Council is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, the nation's three most prestigious scientific advisory bodies, and its reports generally carry weight with all political factions in Washington.
Many scientists have said that confinement, or lack thereof, is proving to be the Achilles' heel of genetic engineering. The gene-altered food crops commercialized to date -- the most important are soybeans, corn, and canola -- have turned up repeatedly in unexpected places. Seeds have fallen off trucks, pollen has blown into nearby fields, grains have been mixed together accidentally in silos.
These incidents have not created a problem for the food supply, since the crops are tested and approved for human consumption, but they have cost some farmers money, particularly in overseas markets where people don't want gene-altered ingredients in their food. One gene-altered crop not approved for human consumption, Starlink corn, did taint the American food supply, and companies were forced to recall scores of grocery products such as taco shells. That problem was caught not by any government testing regime -- there isn't one -- but by an environmental coalition that bought corn products at Safeway and ordered its own tests.
The newer organisms under development promise to be even harder to control. Plants, after all, are stuck in place with roots in the ground, but some of the newer organisms are animals, capable of moving about on their own. Some of the new organisms are not meant for human consumption, and the Food and Drug Administration is likely to tolerate no accidental mixing with foods, even at extremely low levels. Other organisms are expected to be tested and approved for food safety, but may still pose ecological risks if they are not controlled properly.
Various bioconfinement techniques have already been developed, but all suffer from problems that undermine their reliability, the new report said. It noted that scientists are working on additional techniques that might, in the end, prove highly reliable. For instance, a plant could be engineered so that its flowers always die before spreading pollen, or an animal could be made dependent on some man-made substance so that it would die if it escaped. But these methods are still in the early research stages and many years of work and testing are needed before they can be deemed reliable, the report said.
As a case study of the difficulties, the new report offered the example of a genetically engineered salmon under development by Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc. of Waltham, Mass. The salmon grows four or five times as fast as normal salmon in its youthful stages, and reaches market size in half the usual time, requiring less feed. Aqua Bounty wants to sell the fish for use in ocean pens along the East Coast, where other farm-raised salmon are grown. The company has acknowledged that some fish will inevitably escape, but it has said they will be so dependent on food supplied by humans that they are likely to die in the open ocean.
Environmentalists are worried that the fish, which they have dubbed Frankensalmon, would not die, but instead would wipe out dwindling stocks of wild Atlantic salmon by competing with them for food and, among males, competing for access to wild females. To meet these concerns, Aqua Bounty plans to sell only sterile, female lines of fish. But the new report said the methods for sterilizing the fish are not entirely reliable, and it urged that the Aqua Bounty fish be tested individually for sterility or grown only in tanks on land -- expensive methods that most fish-farming companies are likely to resist.
Joseph McGonigle, a vice president at Aqua Bounty Technologies, said this morning that his company was still evaluating its production techniques and the report was premature in drawing conclusions about how reliable they would be.
"All of this is really just sound and fury," McGonigle said. "Nobody has any evidence, and it's not going to be there until we put it on the table. We're certainly aware of the risks."
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32185-2004Jan20?language=printer 22jan04
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