The Smith referred to here is none other than Fairfield, Iowa's Jeffrey
Smith, a voting member of the Sierra Club national Genetic Engineering Committee.
This review appeared in the GMwatch newsletter, which is written in the UK.
[GM means "genetic modification" which means the same thing as genetic
engineering.]
Tom
=============================================================================
EXTRACT: Smith has to be the best science communicator alive today, and this
book stands as the final word on GM health risks. It's the definitive answer
to those who don't know, those who don't want to know, and those who know
but don't want anyone else to know.
---
---
Review of Jeffrey M. Smith's Genetic Roulette: The documented health risks
of genetically modified foods
Yes! Books, May 2007
Available from www.amazon.com / www.amazon.co.uk
www.geneticroulette.com *
and from Green Books:
http://greenbooks.co.uk/store/index.php?osCsid=42f040c6434592d845ae30e774d4a9a
b&cPath=22&sort=3a&filter_id=38 *
* special case price available for 16 books
Reviewer: Claire Robinson
What's your response when someone comes out with a fatuous statement they've
picked up from somewhere to the effect that "There's no evidence that GM
food is harmful"?
If you have time and energy enough, perhaps you manage to scrabble together
some bits and pieces from your memory, the web, a book or an article. But
considering the number of calls that the business of living places on your time
and energy, maybe you just shrug your shoulders and muse that the world is
going to hell in a handbasket of Bush, Blair, and Monsanto's making and there's
nothing you can do about it.
Well, now there is. Just point them in the direction of the latest book from
Jeffrey Smith, Genetic Roulette: The documented health risks of genetically
modified foods.
A must-read for every policy-maker, educator, and journalist, it's also
invaluable for anyone who wants to sharpen up their weaponry in the battle
against the imposition of GM foods. And judging by the steady stream of emails I've
received over the years from students in schools, colleges, and universities
asking me to explain the risks of GM food, every educational institution and
public library needs to buy a copy.
Of course, those who enjoyed Smith's previous book, Seeds of Deception,
should be warned that this isn't the same sort of read. 'Seeds' laid out the
fraud of GM through its stories: the honest scientists who were gagged,
threatened, and persecuted; the revolving door between industry and regulators that
led to untested GMOs being unleashed into the food supply; the consumers who
got sick and died from eating a supplement produced with GM bacteria, only to
have their suffering covered up by a government that cared only to protect the
interests of the industry.
While Smith's last book uncompromisingly presented the science challenging
the claimed safety of GMOs, the focus was on the human. The
salesmen-scientists and the whistle-blowers of the GM world were shown doing what they have to
do - in the case of the first, to protect their careers, and in the case of
the second, to protect public health, the planet, and their ability to sleep
at night. Genetic Roulette is not a book of stories, but rather an easy-to-use
reference book of scientific fact and documented findings on the risks of GM
foods.
It will come as no surprise to GM Watch subscribers that contrary to what
the industry would have us believe, there are a considerable number of findings
that show GM causes harm. Smith uses much previously unavailable material
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and has trawled through piles of
industry submissions and government documents. He extracts the scientific
meat and methodically lays it out for our examination, with one finding per
chapter section. One section, for example, is headed, "Mice fed Roundup Ready soy
had liver cell problems". The finding is described in full, followed by
possible interpretations and comments, either by the researchers themselves or
other experts.
Given the worrying lack of substantial published research, Smith also draws
upon unpublished studies, case studies, medical reports, media reports, and
eyewitness accounts. Unlike the notorious pronouncements of supporters of the
biotech industry, interpretations and statements of opinion are never
misrepresented as scientific fact. Readers will always know the status of what they
are reading and the basis for it. The author has gone to great lengths to
maintain accuracy of reporting, having each section of the book checked by at
least three scientists.
Other sections of the book highlight serious flaws and gaps in the
industry's case for GM food safety. Again, each chapter section is devoted to a
particular topic, such as the ability of GM disease-resistant crops to promote
dangerous new viruses. Scientific evidence for this is laid out with
explanations. All points are referenced in unobtrusive footnotes.
Even those who know quite a bit about the GM issue will learn lots from this
book. Perhaps this is partly due to Smith's status as a non-scientist: he
does not assume specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, and explains
things that many of us have become used to skimming over because of our lack of
such knowledge.
For example, ever wondered why a certain batch of GM crops is called an
"event"? Smith explains that each batch is produced by inserting the transgene
into the host plant cells either by the gene gun method or by infection with a
bacterium. So random and disruptive is this process to the host cells that
the results are different with each insertion. The process is neither
repeatable nor reproducible. Scientists tell me, however, that repeatability and
reproducibility are generally viewed as prerequisites to any process that claims
to be scientific. In this light, the GM process as it is currently practiced
is not scientific. Nor does it even qualify as engineering, as the engineering
equivalent would be to try to build the Forth Bridge by tossing an
assortment of girders, nuts and bolts in the general region of the Firth of Forth and
letting a bunch of monkeys fiddle with them: an intelligence of a sort is at
work, but the result is utterly unpredictable. Thus, even if government
regulators had a road-to-Damascus conversion and actually started policing GM
technology as they are supposed to, any safety tests performed on one "event" of
a GM crop would have to be repeated on all other events before the crop could
be pronounced safe. Cheap GM crops for the third world, anyone?
Another interesting snippet concerns allergies to GM Roundup Ready soy. The
one comforting factor when dealing with allergies to conventional foods is
that once you know your poison, you can generally avoid it, and your allergic
reaction ceases. But not with Roundup Ready soy. Research has shown that a
portion of the transgene from the GM soy is transferred into human gut bacteria.
In addition, the gut bacteria survive doses of Roundup's active ingredient,
glyphosate. This indicates that the transgene continues to produce its
Roundup Ready protein from within the gut bacteria. If this is so, then long after
you stop eating GM soy, you may be constantly exposed to the potentially
allergenic protein. The medical consequences of ongoing allergic reactions to an
ingredient widely used in processed foods have not been addressed.
Conspicuous by their absence are follow-up studies to those that show harm
from GM foods. The book details the tactics that industry uses to shut down or
bury inconvenient research, including ignoring it, attempting to discredit
the research or its authors, and funding competing studies so poorly designed
that no meaningful findings can possibly be extracted. If all else fails,
industry-aligned researchers discount deaths of experimental animals or claim
that statistically significant results have, magically, no significance at all.
The layout of the book is an exemplar of clarity and should serve as the
model for any reference book (authors of science books, please note: fewer
people would give up on science if it were this easy to digest). It is designed to
make the material accessible to three levels of reader: the scanner, the
casual reader, and the reader who wants all the detail. Each double-page spread
is devoted to a particular problem with GM foods, with the left-hand page
having the topic heading, a featured quote by a scientist or expert, and a few
short bullet points, and the right-hand page giving the technical detail.
Scanners can take in the left-hand page at a glance; casual readers can read the
main narrative on the right-hand page; and for those who need detail, there
are paragraphs of indented text giving figures and examples. You don't need a
science background to understand it. While the book is not bedtime reading,
all terms are defined and the boggle factor is kept low. The excellent table of
contents gives a one-sentence summary of each of the risks of GM foods and
enables the reader quickly to access the evidence.
Smith has to be the best science communicator alive today, and this book
stands as the final word on GM health risks. It's the definitive answer to those
who don't know, those who don't want to know, and those who know but don't
want anyone else to know.
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