Scientists from various disciplines, gathered in colloquium on the occasion of the 70th Annual Congress of the French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science (ACFAS), Are sounding the alarm: we are currently witnessing an unprecedented wave phenomenon that risks placing the entire planet in front of a dangerous “fait accompli”. The colloquium-workshop “Life sciences and societies: the case of transgenesis” allowed a clear consensus to be reached among the participants: genetic technology has taken precedence over science and is currently spreading applications for which no theoretical concept is available and whose effects on the environment and on human health are unknown.
May 22, 2002 – Much has been said in recent years about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which now represent an increasing portion of our diet. Transgenic soybeans, maize and rapeseed alone occupied some 60 million hectares in 2001 and growth appears to be continuing in 2002.
In Canada, 70% of cultivated rapeseed results from transgenesis, a genetic engineering technology, which is far from unanimous in terms of its safety. This rapeseed, which occupies 4 million hectares, is used to make canola oil, a ubiquitous ingredient in the North American diet. The label on the bottle of oil sold in grocery stores does not say so, but there is at least a 70% chance that it contains GMOs. The same is true of prepared foods that are made with canola oil.
In Quebec, it is mainly corn that is transgenic, in roughly the same proportions as rapeseed in the rest of Canada. It is used for animal or human consumption, depending on the varieties and the regulations of the various countries. Once again, we do not advertise the transgenic nature of corn offered in grocery stores. Nor does it indicate, on the packaging of prepared foods, whether the product contains corn oil, corn flour or corn starch from transgenic plants. According to Canadian regulations, this initiative is left to the discretion and goodwill of manufacturers. To date, no manufacturer has availed itself of its right to clearly identify that its product contains GMOs …
The United States, for its part, is by far the largest producer of transgenic soybeans. Approximately 90% of the world’s stocks of transgenic soybeans currently consist of soybeans resistant to Round-Up®, a herbicide manufactured by the company Monsanto Inc., the multinational which also holds the patents on soybeans, corn and GMO rapeseed comprising the Round-Up® resistance gene. An essential commercial success for the company.
From the table to the pharmacy
In recent years, while trials of transgenic crops have experienced a remarkable boom and genetic engineering research seemed to be sky-high, a few large multinational agribusinesses began to join forces with a few large pharmaceuticals. . Thus, a company like Novartis, created in 1996 by the merger of two giants, Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, operates in what is now commonly called the life sciences sector, which includes the supply of seeds, d ‘fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to the food industry as well as the supply of drugs to health services around the world. A “mega company” which includes 275 subsidiaries in 142 countries.
After 96 years in the chemical industry, Monsanto for its part decided in 1997 to transform itself into a life sciences company. The activities of the chemical industry were ceded to a company created for this purpose in September 1997, Solutia Inc. Since that date, Monsanto has devoted all its energy to the fields of agriculture, food and health , leaving behind the tons of PCBs that she bequeathed to the managers of the planet when she was working in chemicals.
In short, it is not surprising that the latest generations of new drugs are the result of genetic engineering, since these are the same players who work in the agrifood and pharmaceutical fields.
This worries Ann Clark, professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “We currently have proof that certain genetic characteristics of GMO seeds have migrated into the environment and are transmitted to other plants,” she said during the conference. And she asks the following question: “What will be the consequences when the genetic characters of drugs, vaccines or enzymes start to migrate into the environment?” ”
An example: human insulin
Corin Fuller, president and founder of the Canadian organization Pharmawatch, maintains that between 3 and 36% (the margin is huge because studies are few and poorly funded) of diabetics who take insulin experience various problems since natural (animal) insulin was replaced by a synthetic insulin, derived from the recombination of the DNA of human insulin, a new technology of genetic engineering. According to Ms. Fuller (who is herself diabetic), as well as the opinion of several groups of diabetics around the world, episodes of hypoglycemia caused by insulin have increased markedly since the big pharmaceutical companies started to use it. synthetic or “recombinant” insulin, during the 1990s. “Today, said Ms. Fuller, diabetics no longer have a choice: what is offered to them is recombinant-DNA insulin, which ‘they have to pay more than they once paid for animal-source insulin. And the companies don’t even bother to fund serious studies to find out if the new product is not a source of problems for patients ”.
The technological slippage
Speakers at the conference, which was organized by the Technosciences du Vivant et Sociétés research group, under the direction of Louise Vandelac, Ph.D, professor of sociology at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (ISE) and researcher at CINBIOSE , UQÀM, have all identified, each in their own field, a sort of “collective slippage of reason and conscience” in the management of genetic engineering products.
Michel Tibon-Cornillot from L’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France), for his part, underlined “the significant gap that exists between technological know-how and scientific concepts in the field of genetic engineering”. According to him, this erasure of science in front of technology has already happened in the past. He cites the example of the craze for lobotomy at the beginning of the last century, when this procedure was performed tens of thousands of times, to solve a multitude of “problems” ranging from simple “hysteria” to schizophrenia, through “homosexuality”! A great surgeon then published a manual describing in detail the techniques for performing a lobotomy according to the rules of modern surgery. But the theoretical foundations were lacking. It was only later that we realized the complete uselessness of the majority of these lobotomies. Professor Tibon believes that we are currently at the heart of such a collective madness.
For his part, Gilles-Éric Seralimi, molecular biologist at the University of Caen (France) and chairman of the Committee for independent research and information on genetic engineering argued that, to counter the slippages of reason and consciousness , it was essential that citizens, farmers, consumers, health professionals, patients, etc., stand up and demand that their respective governments respect the precautionary principle when it comes to genetic engineering. “In France,” he says, “consumer rights groups have squarely sued their governments for negligence in the transgenic corn file. This is what finally made things happen ”. There is in fact a moratorium on the importation of GMOs into Europe and their management is submitted, in France, to committees of independent experts within which there are necessarily consumer representatives.
The participants in the conference were forced to note that, in our country, the democratic process left something to be desired in the field of genetic engineering. At the same time, the Court of Appeal for Canada was hearing arguments from Percy Schmeiser, a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, whose fields were contaminated with Monsanto’s Round-Up® resistant rapeseed.1 He asked the Court to agree to revise its decision which finds him guilty of having violated the law on intellectual property by not warning the company that the transgenic plant had contaminated his field. The Court had ordered the septuagenarian farmer, in April 2001, to pay $ 153,000 to Monsanto. Mr. Schmeiser has never purchased his seeds from Monsanto and does not use Round-Up® herbicide on his crops. He has been growing the same variety of rapeseed for decades and is saving his own seeds for the next season’s cultivation. Since his harvest was seized on the pretext that there was part of seeds carrying the gene for resistance to Round-Up®, he lost the fruit of the improvement work of his rapeseed which, thus taken from a year to the other, adapted better and better, in a natural way, to the specific conditions of its lands.
Pierre Lefrançois – PasseportSanté.net
Note. The texts of the speeches made during this conference held on May 15, 2002 at Laval University in Quebec will be published in the fall of 2002. To obtain a copy, please contact the Research Group Technosciences du Vivant et Sociétés: environnement, health, ethics and public policies. Telephone: (514) 987-3000, extension 4307.
Email: vandelac.louise@uqam.ca
1. E. Ann Clark, Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, on Percy Schmeiser’s website (accessed May 15, 2002). www.percyschmeiser.com
