Nature Rejects Scientific Debate on UK Field Trials.

• Author: Ho, Mae-Wan
• Position: Biodevastation - Genetically modified crops - Brief Article

The following commentary on an article published in Nature describing UK's farm-scale field trials was rejected by the correspondence editor, "following discussion with our editorial team." This is not the first time that Nature has refused to allow real scientific debate on genetically modified (GM) crops to take place in its pages.

Sir, Your report (1) states, "The scientists behind Britain's farm-scale field trials accept that they cannot answer all the questions surrounding the ecological effects of herbicide-tolerant GM crops- much less GM technology in general." Yet, like other previous reports in Nature, it persists in giving the impression that the battle is between "environmental group and organic farming movement" on one side and "science" on the other. There are at least two problems with GM technology that have been debated among scientists, genetic instability of GMOs and their propensity for horizontal gene transfer (2,3). We have insisted that molecular data documenting genetic stability of transgenic lines must be provided before any environmental release(4). Unless a transgenic line is stable, one might as well forget about studying its long term environmental or health impacts.

Unfortunately, none of the GM crops undergoing farm-scale field trials, or indeed in commercial release elsewhere in the world, has been documented to be stable. And no studies on horizontal gene transfer are included in UK field trials.

The instability of GMOs is now generally recognized. Even the "top success," Roundup Ready soya, is showing every sign of breakdown: reduced yield, non-germination, diseases and infestation by new pests.(5) Molecular genetic characterization, the first ever done on any commercially grown GM crop so far, has failed to confirm the structure of the insert originally reported. Instead, both the GM construct and the host genome have been scrambled (rearranged), and hundreds of basepairs of unknown DNA have got in as well(6). A risk assessment study funded by the European Commission (EC) concludes:(7) "Biotechnology relies to a large extent on our ability to introduce foreign genes into cells. A major problem with present day technology is the non-predictability of the...