| PALO ALTO, Calif. -- One of the burning issues of the new
millennium masquerades behind a veil of different and often confusing
names: biotechnology, genetic modification, gene-splicing.
All these terms involve taking living organisms and making some sort of
genetic improvement to create useful and important products. Whatever it
is called, biotech in recent years has kicked up dust clouds of
controversy -- much of it sheer hyperbole.
Biotech is an area that largely has been distorted and misrepresented.
I often have conversations with TV or radio producers who want to provide
"both sides" of the issue.
Yet, the discipline of science being what it is, that approach is akin
to arguing about whether a blood transfusion is a good thing for someone
traumatically injured in a car crash or whether antibiotics should be
administered to a patient with pneumonia.
Benefits
There really are no two sides to the issue. Biotech is an improvement
over previous technologies used for similar purposes. It stands on its own
safety record; and has produced important consumer benefits of all kinds.
One of the major benefits is turning millions of starving and
malnourished people from poverty-stricken nations into first-time
consumers of enough proteins and carbohydrates to actually achieve a
proper diet.
Opposition to biotechnology really is a fear of the unfamiliar by
people not well-versed in scientific methodology and with little
understanding of how to extract meaningful information from piles of data.
Such naysayers abound throughout history. Every time a new breakthrough
appears, they throw up roadblocks and man the barricades -- only to be
trampled underfoot by the inexorable march of human progress.
Their latest effort is aimed at demonizing and defeating biotechnology.
They will lose simply because science -- which is to say reason supported
by demonstrable proof -- conclusively shows that biotechnology is both
safe and beneficial.
Not a new concept
First, it is important to understand that genetic modification of
plants and micro-organisms for food production, agricultural enhancement
and environmental protection is not new. It merely is an improved version
of breeding and hybridization practices that have been used for thousands
of years. What is new is that through modern techniques we can engineer
genetic improvements much more precisely, predictably and faster than ever
before.
Second, the use of gene-spliced plants for food and fiber and other
purposes has an amazing safety record for both the environment and human
health.
Third, despite its incredibly safe track record, gene-splicing already
is not just well-regulated, but, in many cases, massively overregulated.
The Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and
now the Food and Drug Administration all have regulatory policies that
discriminate against these biotech products solely on the basis that they
are created by using gene-splicing techniques.
In early 1999, the FDA changed its longstanding policy of regulating on
the basis of genuine risk, which treated gene-spliced foods no differently
from others, to a policy that requires gene-spliced foods to undergo a
mandatory premarket evaluation.
EPA is about to introduce a rule that will treat as pesticides any
plants that have been genetically improved for pest or disease resistance
and/or improved with gene-splicing techniques.
In a move that seems like a throwback to witchcraft, EPA wants to
regulate gene-spliced marigolds, strawberries, wheat and corn as
stringently as it would regulate malathion or parathion.
Gene-splicing already is excessively and unscientifically regulated by
U.S. agencies, by the European Union and, perhaps most ominously, by
United Nations agencies and programs that really are not accountable to
anyone.
As these controversies -- or pseudo-controversies -- unfold, the public
should be skeptical about them and ask their elected representatives to
insist that federal agencies base their decisions on scientific principles
and existing data.
What is needed, but has been sorely lacking, is the political will to
insist upon policies that make scientific and common sense and that are
genuinely in the public interest. One hopes that the Bush administration's
new crop of officials can separate the wheat from the chaff.
Editor's Note: Miller is a fellow at Stanford Universi ty's Hoover
Institution and a former regulatory official in the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. This column is excerpted from an article that originally
appeared in the The Women's Quarterly, a publication of the Inde pendent
Women's Forum. |