(UPDATED*) The Atlantic: Why GM foods are dangerous. Oh? Some cry foul.
This week The Atlantic, accelerating away from its old persona as a sharp but thoughtful monthly magazine with an East Coast Ivy League ethos and into the hurry-up-and-shock-me world of on line journalism, posted a story sure to foment loud arguments. Ari LeVaux, best known as a food columnist, dives spatchel-first into nutrition science and genomics under the provocative hed, The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods.
This exploration of the benefits and, more important, non-benefits of sneaking a few extra genes into familiar farm products is a stunner. Its pivot point is a recent paper from researchers at Nanjing University in China. They reported discovery of distinctive rice micro-RNAs, small regulatory proteins akin to but different in function from messenger RNA, in the blood and tissues of people who had eaten rice. That the rice’s micro-RNAs could reach the gut and make their way more or less intact to other organs is pretty interesting. LeVaux leaps from that finding to declare, largely without endorsement by outside experts, that this means introducing foreign DNA into foods we eat – things like frog proteins expressed in bananas which I just made up as an example – carries the risk of scattering through our bodies micro-RNAs that our species does not normally encounter. Maybe they’d derange expression of our own DNA in ways that are unhealthy. We are not only eating food, the article reveals, but “information” from modified DNA. Say what?
Ingestion of unexpected micro-RNA could in some cases maybe screw something up, right? But does this equal a “very real danger” as the hed promises? One thinks, reflexively, No. That is, the harm hardly seems likely to make much if any difference in total risk, given the oodles of regular food we eat along with all the micro-RNA they must be packing. One is not even sure whether a stretch of transpecies DNA in food comes with its own platter of microRNA. Aside from that, grains and ice cream and lots of stuff have, already and yuck, insect parts and pollen and other things in them that just got caught up in the industrial food chain. They have DNA too. Maybe we’re lousy with foreign, random micro-RNA as it is. The Atlantic story has the smell of inflammatory nonsense, but this is just intuition talking.
Fortunately (for me), your tracker need not try to sort all that out. At least one, more qualified blogger has already done that. It is a pleasure to give her a shout out.
At The Biology Files, Emily Willingham blasts away under the hed, Why did The Atlantic publish this piece trying to link miRNAs and GMOs? MicroRNAs, this biologist and writer reports, are a newly-discovered, biological wonder. And are powerful actors in metabolism. But other than that, she finds nothing in the Chinese study that supports several of the more startling assertions in the Atlantic story. She writes that, while trying to find backing for the headline on that story, she found herself “distracted by how poorly the article presents the science itself.” Not only that, but while the article’s passages and headline deks declare that new research even sheds light on such goofiness as explaining how herbal medicines function, there is nothing in the research paper or elsewhere to explain that, she tells her readers.
It’s possible that further research into miRNA associated with GMOs will show them to pose a distinctly different sort of hazard than all the other miRNA we’ve been living with for eons. But after reading Willingham’s discourse, the odds seem long, and the case surely has not been make in the pages of The Atlantic.
A second shout out of gratitude to science writer blogger Keith Kloor, who saw Willingham’s post and brought it to my attention. His post is at Collide-a-scape.
Finally, not all bloggers are condemning the Atlantic article. At Grist, food and ag writer Tom Laskawy, who often tosses brickbats at the food industry, welcomes it. He writes that Levaux in the Atlantic may have mixed up some of the science, but that microRNA may be an even bigger problem than Levaux realized. MicroRNA, Laskawy frets, is not merely a side effect of GMO, but is central to some of the deliberate strategies of biotech companies and their plans for new, designer food and tools to protect food from pests. “Its entirely possible,” he writes, “that microRNA meant to target a specific insect gene will also have an effect – possibly unpredictable – in humans.”
*UPDATE: This is encouraging. Again, thank you Keith Kloor (see his own update post) and others for the tips: The author of the Atlantic article has tweeted a message to critic Willingham re her analysis: “Thank you for that. And for your other comments. I’m re-writing the piece with corrections.”
- Charlie Petit
January 10th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
First…this is precisely what the Tracker is for. Bravo for including this one and calling for caution.
Second, the coverage of risk by the news media usually fails to carefully consider, or include, or give fair and equal play to, facts that might moderate the alarm, and therefore diminish the attention-getting nature of the story. And it’s not to ‘sell papers’ or attract hits. Or at least, not just. The reporter wants to get their story high play (sold, if it’s a freelancer), to be on the front page.
Mea Culpa. I did this a ton in my daily reporting days. But alarmism that is not fair to the facts leads to choices, and stress, that harms people. Journalism needs to own the responsibility of that in any story about risk.
January 10th, 2012 at 3:49 pm
Charlie,
I think you are right to trust your intuition–my intuition says the same, that there are problems with this article. But it’s more than intuition. The writer did not answer the reasonable questions you ask, such as: Are we not already full of micro-RNAs from the ordinary, DNA-rich foods we eat that are not genetically modified? Had that questions and some other obvious questions been answered, as you point out, this piece would have had a better chance of making its case.
January 10th, 2012 at 3:51 pm
I want to endorse what David said. The point about the reporter’s (sometimes unconscious) motivation is very astute, and something we don’t always think about.
January 10th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Agreed that this was a badly composed, haphazardly reasoned (and horribly headlined) article. But I don’t think Ari Levaux was out of line in saying — albeit sloppily — that if consumed plant miRNA does unexpectedly influence cellular function, then it suggests an heretofore-unappreciated route by which transgenic plants could differ from traditionally bred plants, which matters because GM plants are given light regulatory treatment on the basis of “substantial equivalence.”
Of course, a good reporter would raise this as a question, then pose it to multiple sources — and if that wasn’t possible, would simply raise the question without jumping to conclusions. But as a question, it strikes me as a very reasonable one, and shouldn’t be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.
January 10th, 2012 at 4:37 pm
There’s an interesting postscript, which I just put on my post in an update. It reads:
On Twitter, Levaux thanks Willingham and says he’s “re-writing the piece with corrections.”
January 10th, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Great post. With tongue partway in cheek, I must add that there is an unfortunate side effect. This and other blogs are inevitably increasing traffic to the original flawed article!
January 10th, 2012 at 8:33 pm
You have a really good point Charlie.
January 10th, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Agreed with Brandon that the original paper has intriguing implications, as many noted when it came out, though these findings will have to be duplicated. As for regulatory requirements, I’ll leave that to greater minds.
As an aside, it does seem ironic, or at least poignant, that work introducing virus resistance through transgenes — Hawaii’s widely consumed ringspot-resistant papaya being the most prominent example — ultimately led to the discovery of miRNA in the first place.
January 11th, 2012 at 6:17 am
I’d make the point here that micro RNA (miRNA) has a history of safe presence in existing conventional plant foods, and micro RNAs identical to human micro RNA is present plant foods. Often worries are raised bout GM foods for certain speculative risks, but the same risks that already present in other common foods are ignored. This is what the Atlantic article does.
When we are already have been widely and repeatedly exposed to these risks for a long time, it’s certain that GM foods don’t add much risk, and very like add none.
I posted on this topic some time back at my blog, here
http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2011/11/history-of-safe-use-of-small-rnas-in.html
and even earlier at the same blog. This blog post documents the appearance of the micro RNAs in non-GM plant dietary components and their similarity, and some cases their identity, to human body components