Butterfly Experiment Highlights Biotech Hazards.

• Author: Tokar, Brian

Genetically engineered crops threaten monarch butterflies. The headlines spread worldwide this past May, after three researchers at Cornell University published a study confirming what critics of biotechnology have been saying for a decade: that the environmental consequences of genetic engineering would prove to be widespread and very damaging.

This was far from the first study of its kind. After 25 years of research in genetic engineering, over a decade of open-air field tests, and three years of aggressive promotion of genetically engineered crops in the commercial marketplace, research on the health and environmental effects of engineered crops is finally beginning to catch up with the industry juggernaut. But while biotech companies pour billions of dollars every year into developing and marketing new high-tech crop varieties, researchers concerned about the health and environmental consequences of these technologies face scarce research funds, unrealistic burdens of proof, and sometimes even professional ostracism. For more than two decades, assertions about the likely ill effects of genetic engineering have been dismissed as mere speculation. As fast-merging "life science" conglomerates seek to control all aspects of seed production, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceutical manufacture, their reach is having an ever more chilling effect on many areas of science.

In this setting, it is quite remarkable that the monarch study was done at all. It is even more remarkable that it was done at Cornell University, home of the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council, the biotech-centered Boyce Thompson Institute, and numerous individual researchers who are focused on everything from Bovine Growth Hormone to developing new biotech crop varieties. This may explain why Cornell entomologist Dr. John Losey was so quick to downplay the real-world consequences of his experiment.

What Dr. Losey and his two colleagues did was quite straightforward in scientific terms. They collected pollen from one of the "pest-resistant" corn varieties that is now being aggressively promoted by Monsanto and other biotech companies. The corn plants are genetically engineered to secrete very high doses of a toxin naturally produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, commonly known as Bt. While short-lived Bt bacteria normally produce this toxin in an inactive form, which becomes activated only when absorbed into the highly alkaline digestive systems of organisms such as the corn rootworm, genetically engineered Bt crops produce up to 20 times as much toxin in its activated form in every plant tissue throughout the plant's entire life cycle.

The Cornell researchers used a simple spatula to apply Bt corn pollen to the leaves of common milkweed, which is the sole food source...