Transgene Escape! – But No One Has Called Out the Guards

Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Centre for Food Safety

Introduction

One route by which transgenes (the genes engineered into crops) may cause harm is by permanently escaping from agricultural environments into wild or natural areas. This is not likely to happen with most GMO crop plants, because most crops have been hobbled by millennia of breeding and cannot survive without human intervention, such as planting and weeding. The addition of one or several transgenes generally cannot overcome this long history of domestication. However, most crops have wild relatives that they can interbreed with, thus passing crop genes and transgenes into these wild species. For example, over 20 important crops grown in the U.S. have related wild species they can mate with (1).
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Unapproved Transgene Contaminates US Rice Supply

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

Transgene escape has again become a major biosafety and financial issue. On 18 August the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed that non-transgenic long grain rice in the US was contaminated with Bayer transgene event LL601. This transgene encodes resistance to the herbicide phosphinothricin and LL601 has not been approved (deregulated) for cultivation or use in food supplies in the US or elsewhere. Contamination with LL601 was first detected in January and reported to Bayer in May, Bayer informed the USDA in late July. Contamination however is likely to have predated detection in January since the last permit for growing LL601 rice expired in 2001.
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Transgenic Bt Maize Pollen Harms Swallowtails

Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson

Pollen from a Bt insect resistant maize is highly toxic to the European common swallowtail butterfly (Papilio Machaon) according to a paper published last week in the journal Basic and Applied Ecology (Lang and Vojtech 2006 Vol. 7 pp296-306; doi:10.1016/j.baae.2005.10.003). The paper found that for first instar caterpillars the LD50 of Bt 176 corn was 14 pollen grains and that for harm to occur required consumption of as few as 5 pollen grains.
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