By Judy Foreman, Globe Staff, 03/28/00

In the early 1990s, while almost nobody was looking, the biotech industry pulled off quite a coup.

Led by industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis and Aventis, genetic engineers began commercializing an idea they'd worked on for years - tinkering with genes to make crops more resistant to insects and herbicides.

The basic idea was clever. If, say, a gene could be inserted into soybean seeds so the plants would be resistant to an herbicide, farmers could spray their fields with that herbicide, killing the weeds without fear that it would harm the cash crop. If a gene could be introduced into corn that would produce a protein toxic to corn-eating caterpillars, farmers could grow that kind of corn without using high quantities of pesticides.

The idea has not only worked - it's worked too well in the eyes of the anti-biotech crowd, which has been staging counter-demonstrations this week in Boston during BIO2000, the biotech industry's annual gig. Yesterday, four protesters were arrested on disorderly conduct charges for dumping 30 gallons of "genetically altered" soybeans outside the Hynes Convention Center, marring otherwise orderly demonstrations.

Worldwide, the area planted with transgenic crops has soared from 2 million hectares in 1996 to nearly 40 million in 1999, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a research organization based in Washington. In the United States, the world leader in growing genetically modified foods, half of the soybean crop carried the herbicide-resistant gene last year while a third of the corn crop carried the anti-caterpillar gene.

The problem, opponents say, is that in the rush to get "GM," or genetically modified, food out of the lab and into the mouths of consumers - who had not been clamoring for it - the biotech industry did not completely answer the one question that consumers care most about: Are GM foods safe to eat?

In theory, they should be. After all, we eat DNA all the time (we just call it steak or fish), so what's an extra gene or two? We eat corn that over the centuries has been cross-bred so many times - the old, Mendelian way - that it bears little resemblance to its wild ancestors.

And, even if a transplanted gene, or a special kind of DNA called a promoter, did have a destructive effect, the damage would likely show up in the plant into which it was inserted, not the humans who ate the plant. Besides, our digestive enzymes should chew up GM food the same way they process everything else we eat.

Among other things, that means that it's unlikely that, say, a gene from a flounder that's inserted into a tomato (as scientists are doing to make tomatoes more resistant to freezing) would somehow lodge itself forever in the human genome. In fact, if it were that easy to transfer genes, scientists wouldn't have to resort to sophisticated tricks to create transgenic animals in the lab: They could just feed them GM food.

Indeed, there's no evidence that any human has ever been harmed by eating GM food. (This is in contrast, by the way, to evidence that some herbal products, which people assume are safe because they're "natural," can be harmful.)

Given that 60 percent of the processed food now on the American market contain ingredients that have been genetically engineered (a fact many people don't realize), chances are that if the stuff were dangerous, somebody would have noticed.

But none of this is what really irks consumers - including this one - on both sides of the Atlantic. What is irksome is that, even though GM foods may be safe, there's too little testing to say for sure - and there are no labels to guide us.

We don't know, for instance, whether the proteins made by genes inserted into plants could cause serious, even fatal, allergic reactions. In one notorious case, scientists inserted a Brazil nut gene into soybeans to increase protein. When the hybrid was lab tested in 1996, human antibodies reacted to the nut gene, a sign that the product could have caused allergies in people.

"Bioengineering could produce novel protein combinations that the human body has never seen before, potentially resulting in serious allergies that would be difficult to diagnose," said Martin Teitel, executive director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a Cambridge-based watchdog group.

Another concern is that gene-altered foods may have different nutrient value than standard foods. Though the biotech industry disputes it, GM soybeans may have fewer phytoestrogens than normal, a potentially important change, since some consumers eat soybeans precisely to get the hormone-like effects of these plant estrogens.

Opponents of GM foods also worry that gene-altered crops might contain pesticide residues or, worse in the eyes of some opponents, genes that make pesticides in every cell in the plant. (On the other hand, with some gene-altered crops, farmers can use fewer pesticides than normal.)

And then there's the concern that these crops could increase antibiotic resistance.

Bioengineers use antiobiotic-resistance genes as markers to see whether the genes they put into plants get into the DNA. The worry is that eating the altered food could allow the marker genes to pass into bacteria in the human digestive system, making people resistant to potentially life-saving antibiotics.

"That argument is totally bogus for two reasons," fumed Val Giddings, a geneticist and vice president for food and agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington. "Number one, the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers in biotech do not [cause] resistance to antibiotics used to treat human disease. Number two, those resistance genes are already present in the human digestive tract."

Furthermore, he said, "crops improved by biotechology have been subjected to more scrutiny in advance, depth, detail and rigor than any other foods introduced into the food supply in human history."

But have they?

In 1992, faced with the imminent onslaught of GM foods, the FDA decided to regulate those products the same way as new foods created by old-fashioned plant breeding, said Laura Tarantino , deputy director of the office of premarket approval at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

The agency also decided not to consider genes inserted into foods as "additives," which would have required FDA approval before marketing. That means, she acknowledged, that, as of now, "there is no requirement that someone come in for premarket approval" of GM food just because it is "made by recombinant DNA."

This stance so outraged lawyer Steven Druker, executive director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Iowa, that he and others filed a lawsuit against the FDA in 1998 seeking mandatory safety testing and labeling of GM foods. That suit is still pending.

In Europe, consumer pressure against "Frankenfoods" has grown so intense that some grocery chains are tossing transgenic products off their shelves. That, in turn, is making farmers around the world uneasy about growing gene-altered crops.

Indeed, after four years of rapid growth, farmers are expected to reduce planting of genetically engineered seeds by as much as 25 percent this year, the Worldwatch Institute predicts.

Giddings of the biotech organization counters that, at least in the United States, farmers are increasing their plantings of biotech soybeans. They are planting less GM corn, he conceded, but that's not because of consumer resistance but because that crop, engineered to resist a European corn-borer, is no longer endangered by that pest.

The bottom line is that, even if GM foods are safe, and they seem to be so far, consumers have a right to demand labels so they know what they're eating.

Margaret Mellon , a lawyer, molecular biologist and director of the agriculture and biotechnology program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, put it this way:

Consumers "deserve the opportunity to know which foods have been altered and to make a choice about whether they want to take any risk at all, even if that is a very tiny risk."

SIDEBAR

QUESTIONS REMAIN ON `ORGANIC' LABEL

If you want to avoid genetically modified foods, the only way to do that with certainty is to buy foods labeled "organic."

The US Department of Agriculture recently developed new labeling standards to clarify what "organic" means. Among other things, the new standards prohibit organic labeling on any foods produced with genetic engineering.

Organic foods, however, may have their own problems. Since they're often grown without pesticides, you may get some pests with your food. Organic food is often more expensive as well.

If you want to find out more about the controversy over genetically modified foods, visit these Web sites:

www.ucsusa.org (Union of Concerned Scientists)

www.gene-watch.org (Council for Responsible Genetics)

www.biointegrity.org (Alliance for Bio-Integrity)

www.fda.gov

www.monsanto.com

www.bio.org (Biotechnology Industry Organization)

www.ificinfo.org (International Food Information Council)

www.gmabrands.com (Grocery Manufacturers of America)

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