Archives for the 'Nano & Biotech' Category
Reality causing anti-biotech hegemony to waver
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As reports of food prices going through the ceiling are trickling in, some of the countries that traditionally reject plants bred with molecular plant breeding methods (PMBs) are reconsidering.
Japan’s largest corn processor have started buying PMB corn for human consumption, although Japan have permitted PMBs for animal feed.
63,000 tons of PMB corn arrived in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday last week and officials said that they couldn’t get hold of enough non-PMB corn because the European’s are sweeping the small supply that exists off the market.
The trouble with getting hold of non-PMB crops has hurt inside Europe too, a corner stone factory that processed food oils in my hometown in Norway shut down in 2005, and EU official’s thinks that the rice in food prices might sway the European political opposition against PMBs, we can only hope and see…
EU not likely to settle PMB haggling in May either…
EU was supposed to have an authoritative discussion on plants bred with molecular plant breeding techniques (PMB’s) in May. The organization has been fined by the WTO for using PMB bans as a trade barrier but stubborn politicians are blackmailing each other with approvals and denials of various organisms, costing consumers and companies billions of Euros. According the story from Reuters, it does not seem that the May discussion will resolve any issues either…
Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act Poised to Pass
Today, the Senate will consider (and almost certainly pass) the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. Earlier, I discussed the irrational fears behind this law, and how it could undermine public safety in the future (through its lack of a “direct threat” exception, even though that exception exists under other employment laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act), in this blog and the National Law Journal. Biotech policy expert Greg Conko also analyzed the bill and found a lack of evidence that it is needed to address any real problem.
Food Crisis Round Up
As food prices soars to new heights, researchers at Texas A&M makes a potentially revolutionary discovery. They discover a plant gene for saline tolerance in Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis is the trusty old model organism for plant scientists, and this discovery will help us produce new plants using molecular plant breeding methods (PMB’s), if the environmentalists will let us.
Although some of our current ailments are based on ill conceived ethanol mandates, subsidies that skew the food markets, and increased consumption in India and China, a recent op ed in the Telegraph joins a more and more unified Brittish demand for adopting PMB’s. The op ed also points the finger in the direction of OPEC, and the hypocrisy of leaders like Hugo Chavez. Chavez is supposedly a champion of the poor, but the high oil prices caused by the cartel’s price fixing are part of the problem with the rise in the cost of food.
Parts of the Arab world are harvesting the riches from the price fixing, it is important to remember that not all countries in the Arab world have oil. The region is balancing on a precarious edge between civil unrest and political chaos by choosing either of the options available to alleviate the situation.
Zimbabwe is again looking at starvation, not only due to the food prices, but also due to new bouts of drought. Last time they faced this situation, about 6 years ago, the government in Zimbabwe refused to accept aid shipments of maize because the grains came from PMB’s. This is the same corn that Americans eat every day. Luckily the starving population would not stand for this decision, spurred on by jet-setting environmental activists from Europe and USA. They raided the food containers, so the grain eventually got the people it was intended for, but what will the misguided leaders in Zimbabwe do this time around?
On the good news side, Ethopia opened up its first commodity exchange last week, which will lower the transaction cost for several major commodities in the country. Hopefully that will help Ethiopian farmers and consumers with lower cost for important foodstuffs.
Vanity Fair does Frontal Assault on Monsanto
The Green Issue of Vanity fair has already drawn fair critique for being campaign journalism with one-sided sourcing. My primary interest was a story titled Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear. Here is the nut graph:
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.
The main structure of the story is straight out of a report by the Center for Food Safety, called Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers. Center for Food Safety is a high profile anti-biotechnology lobby with strong ties to Union of Concerned Scientists. Center for Food Safety’s Executive Director, Andrew Kimbrell is an understudy of known anti-technologist Jeremy Rifkin, although Rifkin has no problems with plants bred with molecular plant breeding (PMB’s) which the anti-biotechnology lobby calls genetically modified organisms.
The report is a long list of supposed mistreatment of farmers at the hand of Monsanto, while the company is trying to protect and enforce it’s patent rights and license agreements.
The most famous case, which the Vanity Fair reporter did omit, is the Percy Schmeiser case from Canada. Scheiser had brown-bagged Monsanto Canola and was found guilty of this all the way through the Canadian Supreme Court. The anti-biotechnology lobby and Schmeiser himself is still claiming this was pollen flow, and that Monsanto was infringing on his heirloom seed by “polluting” those seeds via pollen flow. The Canadian court documents is unequivocal in their decision that this is not the case. Vanity Fair would not even have had a shred of credibility left, if they had used this case. Instead they picked a case that never went to court, so they could report on the bully tactics, rather than facts that was verified by a court.
The next part of the story is about Monsanto’s company history. This is taken directly out of the movie “The World According to Monsanto” which is a French crockumentary. The crockumentary gives a particular version of the well-known history of the chemical company Monsanto. The version is one that emphasizes malevolence and conspiracy. Against this backdrop the director asks the viewer if they think Monsanto has good intentions with their PMB’s.
The movie gets a ton of facts wrong, including such a basic fact as how Monsanto introduced the Roundup Ready trait into the soybeans. The movie claims the company used a gene gun, while they in fact have been using Agrobacterium for all the non-grass crops.
The last part of the story is about growth hormone for cattle. Diary farmers have been using growth hormone on their cattle since the 1940’s to increase the milk yield from their cattle. The hormones had to be harvested from the pituitary glands of cattle. Only in 1994 did scientists figure out how to get bacteria to produce the same hormone, and Monsanto markets this hormone under the brand name Posilac.
Certain diaries started labeling their milk as not containing growth hormones, which is factually wrong. All milk, regardless of hormone application will contain growth hormone. FDA said this was misleading marketing. The next attempt was to label the milk as produced without growth hormones, however since it is impossible to find a difference between milk from cattle that received growth hormones and milk from cattle that did not, the claim cannot be verified.
Vanity Fair argues that Monsanto is the ones that are pushing the label battle, while it is in fact food snobs that are insisting that this is important consumer information. I still claim that the label organic is all that is required, but most of the food producers in this battle are not willing to pay for organic milk. The food snobs started the label wars, to label Monsanto as the aggressor for defending their product, the integrity of consumer information, and sound science is misrepresentation.
From the beginning some consumers have consistently been hesitant to drink milk from cows treated with artificial hormones. This is one reason Monsanto has waged so many battles with dairies and regulators over the wording of labels on milk cartons. It has sued at least two dairies and one co-op over labeling.
We do in fact know that the milk labeled as produced without growth hormone never captured more than 1.5 percent of the diary market in the food conscious Northeast. But you will not find this information in the playbooks of the Center for Food Safety, which would require the poor reporter to actually do reporting…
Also, the part that the story leaves out on growth hormones and labeling is the fact that anti biotechnology lobby groups are leveraging lawsuits in most of the states across the country. This is driven by lobby groups, not by Monsanto. Monsanto is again in the position of defending itself, they are not the aggressor as Vanity Fair paints them.
For safe measure, Vanity Fair included one source in the whole story that was supposed to represent the other side. This one source was a call to Monsanto who declined to comment on the story about the country storeowner, which says Monsanto threatened him over illegally using the seed. There are plenty of sources out there who would be willing to discredit most all of the stories in Vanity Fair, but again the reporter could not bothered.
The final graph is just a plain out groin kick of Steven Milloy, who supposedly is behind a website that are presenting the other half of the labeling debate. There are some issues where Steven and I do not see eye to eye, mainly the stem cell debate. However, when it comes to all these issues about consumer safety and biotechnology, Steven has his facts straight, and the misleading information comes from the same sources that Vanity fair relied on so heavily in this story.
Cool new business model for plant biotechnology in India
Business incubators have long been a place where small companies can get help that makes them grow to the next level. A non-profit in Hyderabad is now applying that method to the most precarious phase of growth for a plant biotechnology start up: the field trials.
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics are starting up is starting up research facility that will enable smaller firms to outsource field trials. It is a novel approach to business incubating, and it will be interesting to see the results of this project. It might be a smart business model that we can apply to speed up the second green revolution.
Some things are supposed to be private….
Anti-biotechnology activists managed to leverage sunshine laws in Europe to get the EU government to release research information that was supposed to be confidential. Now the activists are trying to do the same thing in India, but for now the Supreme Court are debating the issue.
The research information is submitted to the government under the premise of confidentiality. The government has access to the information so it can review the safety and efficacy of new products, but it has made a promise to keep the information confidential for a time period.
The sunshine laws was never meant to give competitors access to proprietary business research, it was meant to give insight into the day to day workings of politicians and bureaucrats. Using it to break down corporate trust in the regulatory system will stymie innovation, which will cost all of us in the end.
EU GMO Update
The Europeans quarrel with plants bred with molecular plant breeding methods continue. French farmers are pushing for it, but they lost the court case to overturn the ban on genetically modified corn. I previously wrote about the scientific fraud that led to the ban.
While French farmers are trying to get access to biotechnology seed, Austrian activists are trying to pressure the U.S. government to back off penalty tariffs U.S. is considering. The U.S. is considering imposing penalty tariffs because the members of the EU still is not complying with the WTO ruling that stated the import ban on GMO’s is a trade barrier without valid scientific and public health concerns.
Regulation killed the GMO star
This is an amazing story of science success, and of consumer loss. Phillip Larkin got funding from Tasmanian Alkaloids to create a more potent poppy for pharmaceutical purposes. He has met every milestone in the project, but Tasmanian Alkaloids pulled the funding because the Tasmanian government will not permit plants bred with molecular plant breeding methods.
Biotechnology Spin-Zone
The suppliers, producers, and retailers in the industrial organic food chain have long lamented about the possibility of grains from plants bred with molecular plant breeding getting into their organic grain supply.
It is a fundamental fact that we cannot keep any seed supply free of seeds from other plants, whether they belong to the same species or not. Thus there is a widespread acceptance of a 1-2 percent level of other types of seeds, whether these might be from weed plants, other types of the same plants, or in this case, plants that have not been bred with molecular plant breeding methods.
It still baffles me that there is such a resistance against these plants, but if these guys and their customers are willing to pay for the cost of keeping a grain supply outside of the regular grain supply chain, I don’t mind. Their problem is that they are fighting the tide of history, and the non-molecular plant breeding supply is growing smaller with each growing season. This means the prices are going up.
“There were 39 cases of crop contamination in 23 countries in 2007, and more than 200 in 57 countries over the last 10 years, according to biotech critic Greenpeace International.”
OK, so Carey is hedging by labeling her information as one sided, but what constitutes crop contamination for Greenpeace has been known to be a mixed bag. A farmer that was convicted for brown bagging licensed seed is still hailed by Greenpeace and their peers for being a victim of big evil corporations.
I am not sure what contamination is in this case, is it a level of commingling of seeds above the industry standard of 1-2 percent? Is it pollination of a couple of flowers on a plant in a crop by a plant that has been bred with molecular plant breeding? It could be other things as well, so I wonder what it is.
The organic farmer that claims to test every load of grains he buys also puzzles me. This seems to be an excessive cost, especially when he is hedging by also putting warning labels on his products. I only know of two methods of testing the seed, and please correcting me if I am wrong here, but one is to use tissue culture after sterilizing the grain, germinating them, and then pouring the herbicide used as the marker for the novel gene over the germinated seed.
If parts of the seed survive and start propagating new shots, you have a plant bred with molecular plant breeding. This seems straight forward, but it takes time, money, and a lot of care. This farmer also faces the problem of testing for the different herbicides used as markers, which counts somewhere between two and four for corn currently on the market. I don’t see a cattle farmer doing this for every load of grain he buys for his cows.
A cow will eat 7 lbs of corn for every 1 lbs of weight it puts on, and they do gain several hundred pounds during the fattening up stage of their lives where they are forced to sustain themselves on corn anyways.
The other way I can see him doing it is extracting the DNA from the corn and sequencing it to look for the particular gene that was inserted. This takes a lot of expensive equipment and time, and again, I don’t see a cattle farmer taking time for this. But I might be wrong, and there might be some quick shot test on the market that I don’t know about. It is worth investigating, and I will do so in the next months while I work on the book. I promise to report the results here.
Patent that never expires? $5,000 please!
Kate Ackley wrote a great story about the most recent attempt to create a regulatory approval process for generic biotechnology medications on the Hill. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D- Calif.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) has introduced the Pathway for Biosimilars Act, and it is a pretty good piece of work although there are two interesting aspects about it.
First it creates a really long period of data exclusivity, which means that the FDA cannot use any of the filed data from the original patented biotechnology drug to compare to the data about the generic version of the drug. The 14 years of data exclusivity is what the patent holder pharmaceutical companies wanted, the generic pharmaceutical companies want less, much, much less.
In the name of protecting R&D investments on the part of the patent holders, the generic demand are probably on the lower end, but the patent demand is probably a bit on the high end. I am guessing somewhere in the middle, just based off my knowledge of politics, but my guess has nothing to do with the actual scientific requirements.
The second interesting aspect is what lobbyists call the “Botox carve-out”. The Botox carve-out makes an exception to the generic biologics approval process, so that biologics based on biological agents and toxins will not be approved. In essence this will make the patents for Botox last forever, as it is based on the botulin bacteria. I am not sure if Eshoo and Barton feels that they owe this to Allergan, the company who owns Botox, since the Allergan political action committee donated $5,000 to each of them last year. That was a cheap everlasting patent, but it will hamper some painkillers and other medication that are in the pipeline based on toxins.
The lobbyists paid for by the patent owning companies say this is due to national security concerns. This is a straw man. If you were a terrorist, would you really apply for a FDA approval?
GMOs and Government Accountability
While demand for the healthier low-lineolic acid soybean is soaring, because everyone and his mother wants food with healthier fats, the EU is dragging its feet on approving the high-starch potato. That regulatory drag just cost BASF one growing season.
Both plants were bred with molecular plant breeding techniques, so called GMOs, which certain EU countries object to. The World Trade Organization has said there are no valid public health or scientific basis for the objection, but those countries continues to use this as trade barrier.
The questions is, will the EU regulatory system reimburse BASF for the lost profit of the lost growing season?
Disturbing trend
Food prices are going up. Since the green revolution in the 1940s-1960s food prices have been going down, but now they are on an upward trend. There are two reasons for this, the first is grain-based ethanol and the second is that prosperity is catching up with more people in India and China.
Grain-based ethanol is a bad idea, combined with subsidy programs; prices of corn have soared to new heights. We should stop that insanity.
Increased prosperity in India and China is good, but now we have to follow up with an increase in food production. Molecular plant breeding techniques will create that increase. Europe cannot opt out of the international river of grains to go it alone, it’s time to get with the program.
Greg Conko and Ron Bailey have prophesized that it’s just a matter of time before China and India figure out that molecular plant breeding will save the day and that these two countries will ignore Europe’s insistence that this technique should not be used. This is happening now.
The increase in food prices is something we can and ought to stop. We can play around with scary scenarios of global warming, but nothing will kill people as efficiently as higher food prices. The global community ought to pay attention to this trend.
What is a poor reporter to do?
Two groups release reports about the same topic at the same time, their conclusions are diametrically opposed to each other. What is a poor reporter to do?
The obvious thing, which is what Rick Weiss did in the Post, is to make the conflict the narrative of the story and leave the credibility decision to the reader. It is actually a neat trick. The only problem with this story is the labels he uses for the two groups “consumer organization” vs. “consortium largely funded by industry” have totally different connotations for readers that don’t know these groups to begin with.
The two reports were about use of pesticides and biotechnology crops. One report concludes that use is up, one report concludes that use is down. The second report, which is a status report published annually and concludes that use is down, is actually the one that fits into the research consensus in the literature, which ought to be the measuring stick of reliability.
Friends of the Earth is an activist group that is opposed to biotechnology in any way, shape, or form. They have been known to use anecdotal material that has been proven false when scrutinized further, but reporters are not supposed to do that with activist provided material.
International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications is a agriculture research center funded by USDA, private charities like the Rockefeller Foundation and the agricultural industry to promote crop productivity. Among its donors and board members, you will find some of the most prominent names in agricultural science and agriculture based aid programs for the developing world.
Who are we to trust? I would conclude in the opposite direction of where Mr. Weiss lead you in his story, but hey, that’s just me. Who am I to judge the mighty Post, I am just a mere science writer that specializes in writing about food and biotechnology.
Eco-Terrorism leading Britain to decrease transparency
Repeated sabotage attacks by eco-terrorists in Britain have ruined several years’ worth of field trials of plants bred with molecular plant breeding methods. Now the Brits are reevaluating the transparency policy around the trials, considering whether the location of the trial sites should remain hidden from the public unless individuals can prove a need to know.
Armed guards and other surveillance measures did not prevent BASF from losing an entire years’ worth of research last year, and the cost of losing so much data is forcing the firms to move the trials outside of Britain. This might be a temporary victory for the activists, as the plants would still receive approval for commercial growth by the British government.
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