Its permanent web address is: http://www.biotechnology.gov.au/index.cfm?event=object.showContent&objectID=D2FE9C43-BCD6-81AC-1BD89D1C06B6F6D3.
Genetic modification myths
(Last reviewed: 30 Jun 2008)
Biotechnology Australia ceased operations on 30 June 2008. The information on this website has been archived and will no longer be updated.
There are many stories that surround biotechnology – but how many of these are true ... and if they aren’t, what’s the real story?
1. GM food means that we'd be eating genes and it's not natural to eat another organism's genes.
2. Gene technology is inherently risky so we shouldn't proceed with it.
4. Cloning never happens in nature.
5. Changing a gene would never happen naturally, so we shouldn't do it.
8. GM food is likely to cause allergies.
Myth: GM food means that we’d be eating genes and it’s not natural to eat another organism’s genes.
Fact:
It’s impossible to eat without eating genes.
Every organism contains genes. When we eat an apple, we eat the genes in the DNA contained within its cells. These genes in the apple are ‘foreign’ genes, but they don’t have any effect on us because they're digested. The same goes for eating meat.
Even after food is cooked, we're still consuming genes. The cooking process partially breaks the molecules of DNA; we then eat the fragments of DNA in the cooked food. During digestion, the DNA is broken down to its smallest building blocks. Processed plant or animal products, such as wheat flour or salami, still contain gene fragments from the original ingredients, which are also broken down during digestion.
It is quite natural to eat another organism’s genes – actually, it's impossible to avoid - but it doesn't mean that we absorb their genes into our sustem and acquire their characteristics. The genes in GM foods are made of the same material as the genes that we eat every day in all fruits, vegetables and meat, and are treated by the body in the same way as other genes. If you eat DNA in a GM food, or a conventional food, it won't change your DNA, or the DNA of your children.
Myth: Gene technology is inherently risky so we shouldn’t proceed with it.
Fact:
Many people are worried that gene technology is very risky, and it's certainly sensible to consider any hazards that this new technology may bring. By recognising its potential risks, we can ensure that appropriate safety measures are in place. In this way, gene technology is like many other technologies we currently use; for example, electricity. Electricity is delivered to our homes, schools and offices in a form that is easily lethal — and yet we accept the risk because great care is taken to minimise its dangers and because we appreciate the benefits that this technology has brought us.
In Australia, gene technology is carefully regulated so that any risks are managed and contained, while allowing its benefits to be realised.
The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator was established by the Commonwealth Gene Technology Act 2001 (GT Act), and is responsible for regulating genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The object of the GT Act is to “protect the health and safety of people, and protect the environment, by identifying risks posed by or as a result of gene technology, and by managing those risks through regulating certain dealings with GMOs”. ‘Dealings’ with GMOs include contained laboratory research, field trials and commercial release of GM crops.
The GT Act establishes offences for unauthorised dealings with genetically modified organisms. If such dealings occur, offenders are subject to penalties of up $1.1 million, or 5 years imprisonment. These penalties are described in more detail in Part 4, Division 2 of the Gene Technology Act.
For more information about the OGTR and the GT Act contact the OGTR on 1800 181 030, or visit their website.
The Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) protects public health by ensuring that GM foods are safe for consumption. FSANZ assesses the safety of GM foods, and all GM foods must be assessed as safe before they are allowed to be sold in Australia.
The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code provides a common set of food regulations in Australia and New Zealand, including standards for GM foods.
Food standards have the force of law. It's a criminal offence in Australia to supply food that doesn't comply with relevant food standards. For more information about FSANZ and food standards, contact FSANZ on +61 2 6271 2222 or visit their website.
Myth: Natural is always best, and altering, exchanging or transferring genes isn’t natural, so it can’t be good for us.
Fact:
Nature supports us, but not everything in the natural world is always good for us. Cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation from the sun is natural; tobacco and opium are natural. Plenty of poisonous plants and animals are natural.
It's also important to remember that the way we live today isn't ‘natural’. Humans have significantly altered nature to provide a more comfortable and stable lifestyle.
In the same way, modifying plants and animals isn't strictly natural, and yet humans have done this from earliest times. Selective breeding has been used to produce different types of dog, different types of domesticated farm animals, and all of our crop species. Selective breeding is a process used to produce new or improved strains of plants and animals by selecting and breeding for valuable characteristics, such as wheat with higher protein grain.
Selective breeding using crossing can give rise to quite unexpected outcomes. This is because crossing mixes thousands of genes in unpredictable ways. The creation of new varieties by selective crossing involves extensive testing to ensure that natural toxins haven't developed.
Gene technology helps us to breed new varieties of agricultural species more easily and more quickly than in the past, as a specific gene or genes can be selected and transferred; whereas conventional breeding involves a random crossing of a number of genes, which may or may not include the gene of interest. In addition, because only a few required genes are transferred using gene technology, time consuming ‘back-crossing’ steps used in conventional breeding programs can be omitted.
As described above, new varieties created by gene technology are extensively tested before being released commercially, either for use in agriculture and industry, or for consumption as food.
Myth: Cloning never happens in nature.
Fact:
Cloning happens quite often in nature, particularly in the plant world. Whenever a plant sends out a runner, which then develops into a new plant, the original plant has produced a clone. If a cactus drops a fragment that then puts down roots, cloning has happened again.
Animal and human cloning also happens naturally to produce identical twins (or triplets). Modern gene technology is sometimes involved in creating clones of animals at the early embryo stage. This is similar to the process that creates identical twins.
Animals can also be cloned past the embryo stage to produce a new animal; for example, Dolly the sheep was cloned using DNA from another sheep. This is a useful way to ensure that an unusually productive or desirable farm animal can be reproduced. If the high quality animal was instead bred with another individual, it could produce offspring without the desired qualities due to the random mixing of genes that happens in the conventional breeding process.
Myth: Changing a gene would never happen naturally, so we shouldn’t do it.
Fact:
Genes often change, and this is one of the ways diversity has been created in nature. Changes can happen naturally by mutation, where the DNA is altered by radiation from the sun and space, by chemicals, or sometimes even by viruses. Genetic change can also happen when eggs and sperm are formed, during which chromosomes break and re-join, sometimes fragmenting genes and reconstituting them with slightly different versions.
These continual natural changes in genes — and the shuffling around of different versions of genes by sexual reproduction — cause the variation that we see in living things, and help to make every individual different. Over time, gene changes have also been responsible for evolution.
Myth: Gene technology will allow people to create stronger, healthier, brighter and nicer-looking children.
Fact:
It’s an interesting idea, but at the moment it’s not possible for gene technology to be used in this way. Characteristics such as beauty, intelligence and strength are very complex and it’s likely that many genes, as well as environmental effects, contribute to each.
Scientists don’t yet know enough about human genetics to use gene technology to change these characteristics. Of course, the future may be different. Whether science is used in such a way must depend on how it's directed, which is why the community and our elected representatives need to be well informed and educated about the latest scientific developments.
Myth: A plant gene is fundamentally different from an animal gene, and they’re both unlike human genes, so we shouldn’t put genes from an animal into a plant or vice versa.
Fact:
All genes, whether they come from a plant or animal or human, are made of the same chemical substance — DNA. DNA contains four variable portions, known as bases. The order in which these bases are arranged is what makes genes different. But the bases themselves, and the DNA of which they are a part, are the same whether they come from a gum tree, a mouse, a mushroom, a butterfly or a person.
Language provides a good analogy for this. If you re-arrange the words in an English sentence you can change the meaning. But the sentence is still written using English words; each sentence is ‘composed’ of the same stuff arranged differently — exactly as with genes. Biologists now know that every living thing on Earth uses the same genetic language — just as every book written in English uses the same English words. A ‘foreign’ language for life could exist elsewhere in the universe, but on Earth there's only one.
Because animals and plants evolved from a common ancestor, many of their gene activities are very similar. In both cases, the genes that code for making vital molecules for cells to function — for example, enzymes for extracting energy or for copying DNA — are virtually identical in any cell, from any organism, anywhere.
In fact, substances that we think of as being very much animal products can be found in plants. An example is haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment that makes our blood red. The roots of various plants also have a form of haemoglobin. The tiny energy factories in cells – called mitochondria – are nearly identical in plants and animals. The genes that code for the construction and the functioning of mitochondria are virtually indistinguishable between different groups of organisms.
The chemical similarity of plants to ourselves is the reason that we're able to use them as food. Whenever we eat plants, we eat their genes. If you eat a meal of meat and vegetables, you're eating genes from plants and from animals together.
The order of bases in human DNA is remarkably similar to that of many other organisms. The closer a creature is to us in terms of evolution, the greater this similarity. For example, about 98 per cent of our gene sequences are the same as those in chimpanzees. We also share a proportion (albeit smaller) of our gene sequences in common with plants. For this reason, adding a gene found in a plant to an animal, or vice-versa, is seen by some researchers as not breaking much of a barrier.
Gene transfers can sometimes occur in nature — although not to the same degree that biotechnology makes possible. For example, bacteria that colonise plant roots can sometimes pass genes into plants. Viruses regularly move their genes into the cells of the organism that they are infecting. New virus particles can naturally contain fragments of the ‘host’ genes as well as their own, and may pass these on when infecting another host.
Milk, cheese and eggs contain plenty of genes from animals. For lacto-ovo-vegetarians, the possibility of an ‘animal gene’ in a plant may not be a concern. However, vegans may find it ethically wrong to eat a plant that contains a gene that is usually found only in animals. Similar ethical objections hold true for those who adhere strictly to religious dietary rules banning the consumption of certain animals (eg. pig or cow). Consumers concerned about this can contact food manufacturers for detailed information about their products, including any GM foodstuffs.
In July 2000, Australian and New Zealand Health Ministers decided on a scheme for labelling GM foods, to assist consumers in making informed choices. For the latest developments on labelling, see the Food Standards Australia New Zealand website.
Myth: GM food is likely to cause allergies.
Fact
People with food allergies have an unusual immune reaction when they're exposed to specific proteins, called allergens, in food. About 2 per cent of people across all ages have a food allergy of some sort. These people usually react to one or a few allergens in one or two specific foods.
Allergenic proteins are naturally present in some foods. These proteins may be present in conventional foods that are subsequently genetically modified. For example, soy naturally contains proteins that cause allergic reactions in some people. Unless these proteins are specifically removed, they'll remain present in genetically modified soy varieties.
Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) checks to ensure that the levels of naturally-occurring allergens in GM foods haven't significantly increased above the natural range found in the conventional variety of the same foodstuff.
FSANZ also checks to ensure that the new proteins in GM foods aren't likely to be allergenic. If FSANZ had scientific evidence that a new protein in a GM food was allergenic, it's unlikely that the food would be permitted for sale in Australia and New Zealand, even with appropriate labelling.
A mistaken, but often-quoted, example of GM foods causing new allergies concerns genetic material from Brazil nut plants that was inserted into a soy plant to improve its nutritional qualities. A gene coding for a Brazil nut chemical that can cause allergies in some people was also transferred into the soy.
Scientists were aware of the possibility of this transfer, and conducted laboratory testing on the soybean before its release. During the laboratory testing procedure, the allergenic Brazil nut protein was detected in the soy. The modified soy plant was not released, the soybean never reached the market and people never consumed products containing it.
However, the good news is that GM crops could be specially created to eliminate substances that are known to cause common food allergies; for example, GM soy varieties that don't contain the allergens found in conventional soy.
Although scientists may be able to use gene technology to remove identified allergy-causing substances from common crop plants, medical science can't yet solve the problem of food allergy and intolerance. People will continue to have unwanted reactions to many foods. People allergic to peanuts, for example, must still carefully scan the list of ingredients of many foodstuffs in which peanut traces could occur. This problem is unrelated to gene technology.
Myth: Gene technology will create new weeds by transferring herbicide resistance genes into common existing weeds. These ‘superweeds’ will be resistant to any form of control, and will ruin many farmers.
Fact:
Concern about the creation of ‘superweeds’ is based on the possibility that genetically modified crops could transfer a gene for herbicide resistance to surrounding weeds. Herbicide-tolerant crops (crops able to survive applications of weedkiller) have been produced so that a farmer can spray a crop, killing all the weeds but leaving the crop plant unaffected by the herbicide.
If a weed is closely related to the outcrossing crop — and some of the more serious weeds are very similar to crops — then cross-pollination with a herbicide tolerant crop could carry the gene into the weed population. Howerever, cross-pollination isn't just an issue for GM crops; this is also a risk with conventionally-bred (non-GM) herbicide tolerant canola, which is currently in widespread use in Australia.
Some crop plants, like corn and canola, cross-breed readily with other individuals of the same species. In Canada, there is at least one example where a variety of canola already tolerant to one herbicide appears to have acquired tolerances to other herbicides, because of such cross-pollination among the different canola varieties. This gene transfer between cultivars represents a crop management problem which can occur in an ‘outcrossing’ crop like canola. This problem is less of a concern in ‘self-pollinating’ crops like wheat, barley, cotton or peas, which do not transfer pollen between plants.
The question of resistance to agricultural chemicals has a long history. Herbicide tolerant weed species appeared long before the adoption of agricultural biotechnology, mainly due to inappropriate farming practices. The number of herbicide tolerant weeds has increased from a single report in 1978 to the 188 herbicide tolerant weed types in 42 countries reported in a 1997 international survey.
Therefore herbicide tolerance (whether genetically modified or conventionally bred) in an outcrossing crop must be carefully managed to avoid the risk of gene transfer between varieties within the crop, or from the crop to a related weed. However, even if such a transfer were to occur, a herbicide tolerant weed would not be a ‘superweed’. A weed with a gene for herbicide tolerance has no advantage outside the environment in which the herbicide is used.
In fact, a recent 10-year long study, funded in part by industry groups, has shown that genetically modified crops are less likely to survive in the wild than their conventionally-bred counterparts. Even if a weed acquires one or more resistance genes it could still be controlled by other herbicide chemicals, or by traditional methods such as tillage. Also, the transferred gene would not make the plant grow more vigorously.
The question of how readily a crop gene will transfer to a weed species is being actively researched. In trials at Adelaide University’s Waite campus, in which herbicide tolerant canola plants were grown closely alongside wild radish, only two out of 75 million plants cross-pollinated. For more information on cross-pollination research go to the CRC for Australian Weed Management website.
Despite these figures, regulators and scientists have insisted on reducing the risk still further, by designing ‘exclusion zones’ around some GM crops, and by careful licensing so that herbicide-resistant crops are not allowed to be grown in areas in which closely-related weeds occur. Continuing work is also investigating the likelihood of transfer of herbicide tolerance genes from genetically modified crops to non-genetically modified crops.
The Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) has the authority to apply conditions to both field trials and commercial releases of GMOs to stop the GMO and its genetic material from entering the broader environment. This includes limiting the geographic area and size of such crops areas, requiring isolation zones to separate the GM crop from similar crops and requiring monitoring of the area to ensure that the GMO hasn't spread beyond the site upon which it is grown, and post trial monitoring to ensure that the GMO does not persist in the environment beyond the trial period.
In the future it may become possible to prevent added genes from entering the pollen of a GM plant by ensuring that such genes are only present in the chloroplasts of plants (because chloroplasts, a component of green plant cells, are not found in pollen cells). In this case, there would be no chance of the added gene moving to another plant via for example, pollen.
Download this fact sheet below
© Commonwealth of Australia 2010
All content on this site is protected by copyright. You may download, display, print and reproduce this material in unaltered form only (retaining this notice) for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organisation. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, all other rights are reserved. Requests for further authorisation should be directed to: WebHelp@innovation.gov.au.
Download a PDF version [PDF 179 KB | 1min 53secs @ 33.6kbps]
Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files. You can download a free copy from the Adobe web site.
Please note: If you have problems accessing an attached file, or other inquiries about Biotechnology Australia, please contact us.
