What are GE foods?

GE foods are those including ingredients made using techniques in which scientists insert genes into an organism's DNA. [1]

Genes are templates that cells use in creating proteins, which determine many of an organism's characteristics. Changing an organism's genes therefore can cause its cells to make novel proteins, causing it to exhibit a new trait.

For example, a gene conferring cold resistance in fish can make a tomato plant create proteins which similarly give it greater resistance to cold.

GE versus traditional breeding

Traditional breeding is another way of getting genes into an organism to cause it to exhibit a new trait. Although the biotechnology industry would have you believe that GE is just like traditional breeding, it is radically different.

In traditional breeding, members of the same, or very similar, species are crossed to create offspring with some novel trait. This greatly limits the genes that can be combined. Furthermore, when different but similar species are crossed, their offspring are infertile--preventing inter-species gene combinations from propagating in the wild. For example, a donkey and a mare can make a mule, but the mule will be infertile, the end of the line for the combined genes.

GE smashes these natural barriers! Using GE, any gene from any plant, animal, bacterium, fungus or virus can be inserted into the DNA in reproductive cells of any other organism. If the resulting organism survives, it generally can pass on its altered DNA, and whatever new traits it causes, through normal reproduction. For example, GE enables scientists to create pigs which have human genes, genes which will be passed on to future generations of GE pigs.

Inherent danger

Since an organism's genes serve as templates in creating proteins, which determine many of the organism's characteristics, new genes are inserted into an organism's DNA so that it produces novel proteins and novel characteristics. The inherent danger in creating crops and foods in this way is that these novel proteins may easily have unforeseeable consequences.

The likelihood of unforeseeable consequences is exacerbated by the fact that gene insertion is actually wildly imprecise. Scientists cannot determine where, or how many, genes end up in a host organism's DNA. The random insertion of genes can create proteins that have never existed before in nature. It can also inactivate existing genes (preventing them from expressing a normal protein) or activate inactive genes (creating proteins that normally are not expressed).

Environmental scientists discovered decades after their introduction that synthetic pesticides which do not exist in nature (such as DDT) caused massive harm to people and the environment. [2] GE foods (which contain proteins that do not exist in nature) may prove to have similar unpredictable impacts.

The fundamental uncertainty about creating new genetic combinations that propagate to future generations is raising profound objections. Nobel laureate and Harvard professor emeritus in biology Dr. George Wald put it this way: "Our morality up to now has been to go ahead without restriction to learn all that we can about nature. Restructuring nature was not part of the bargain." [3]

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[1] In some cases, the food ingredient itself does not contain a foreign gene, but was produced using a transgenic organism.

[2] DDT was found to accumulate in fish and thin the shells of fish-eating birds, such as eagles and ospreys.