GMOs: Why the Disconnect?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the reluctance of the general public to catch up with the science of GMOs; it puzzled me as to why a technology that is so clearly a force for good in the world should be reviled as a kind of dirty, leprous freak. I have every confidence that in the fullness of time the public will get onboard and we will begin to reap the multifarious benefits such as increased crop yield, decreased pesticide use, increased drought resistance and increased nutritional content; in the meantime, though, we need to think of ways to push understanding forwards. A good place to start would probably be to try to understand what is at the heart of the distrust aimed at GMOs.

A paper published last month in Trends in Plant Science by a group of Belgian philosophers and biotechnologists may begin to do just that. They attempted to explain why there is such a wide gap between public opinion and the scientific evidence and why it is so persistent. The initial premise is that most people have no clue how GMOs are produced or what they even are. If you have no actual knowledge on a subject then you are far more likely to rely on intuition, folk biology and emotions. These can feel very compelling inside us and are easy notions to communicate to others.

One concept they proffer is that of psychological essentialism. This can make people think of DNA as an essential, primal, inviolable part of an organism, something intrinsic to it that makes it what it is, sort of the physical counterpart to a soul. If you take some of this essence from one organism and add it to another it can provoke a feeling of disgust. People also believe that the second organism will have some of the traits of the first. For example, an opinion poll in the US found that more than a half of recipients believed that a tomato that had fish genes incorporated into it would taste of fish. Which it wouldn't, by the way. This doesn't stop anti-GMO organisations playing up to such fears, however.

The paper looks at the disgust angle in some detail. It appears that many people think of the addition of genetic material more of as a contamination. Given that one of the main reasons our sense of disgust evolved was to stop us eating potentially harmful foodstuffs, this would be a compelling feeling in the absence of hard knowledge to counteract it. Once you feel that something is disgusting or amoral then it is very easy to believe almost anything else negative about it. I think this is very much a part of the strategy on immigrants today; first you make them seem sub-human, then you can treat them any way you like. Because the feeling of disgust is a subconscious one we will tend to look for a reason to justify it, and so we will grab on to any reason at hand, even a false one, as we all like to believe we're rational, sensible people.

These kind of primal intuitions about a topic are the most difficult to fight against. You can't use logic and reason to argue someone out of a position that they didn't arrive at through logic and reason. In terms of changing attitudes the authors best suggestion is that we just have to do our best to educate people as to the facts, starting with children of course. The problem with that is that the science of the classroom normally lags a decade or two behind the science of the laboratory and there are a lot of hungry people around the world that won't be able to wait that long.

Image used with permission

Octopus Genome Reveals Secret of Intelligence

Octopuses (not octopi) are incredible; they're definitely the animal I would most like to be melded with in a nuclear meltdown scenario. We all know they have eight legs but did you know they have three hearts? Their blood is blue because they use a copper and cyanide based oxygen transport molecule instead of haemoglobin. They are highly intelligent, capable of finding and remembering a route through a maze. They are exceptionally good at changing not just their colour but also their texture to mimic their surroundings (see video below) and some species have even been observed using tools.

A recent open access article from Nature reports details of the first sequencing of an octopus genome. Contained within the genetic code they think they may have found a couple of clues as to the remarkable intelligence of these curious creatures. Analysis showed that there were two families of genes that had many more members then would normally be found in molluscs (octopuses are molluscs); namely, protocadherins and the C2H2 family of genes.

Before the first draft of the human genome was published in 2000 there was the naive assumption (although reasonable at the time) that the more complex an organism the more genes it must have. Sensible guesses for the number of genes in the human genome were in the range of 50,000-100,000. When it was revealed that we only had about 22,000 it surprised everyone. It turns out, though, that it isn't how many genes you have but what you do with them that counts. One gene can be expressed in many different ways resulting in production of different proteins with slightly different functions; this is how you can get complexity from a small number of genes. To achieve this, though, you need a set of genes capable of manipulating the other genes in such a way; one such group are the C2H2 family. 

Protocadherins are involved with developing neurons, the basic component of any nervous system. Mammals are known to produce a large number of these proteins but generally other families of animals do not. Oysters and other molluscs tend to have about 20 different protocadherins, we now know octopuses have 168. This would allow them to develop a much more complex nervous system than they otherwise might; indeed, octopuses have the largest nervous system of any invertebrate.

Finally the researchers, a joint team from Chicago and Okinawa, revealed that they discovered many hundreds of genes that are unique to octopuses. Some of these are known to be involved in the animal's remarkable mimicking ability but the majority remain a mystery. A rich seam for future research, no doubt.

So there you have it, it would seem that several of the amazing abilities of the octopus could be down to genetic factors. Spare them a thought the next time you chow down on some calamari.

Golden Rant

There are a little over 7 billion people currently in the world, by 2050 there is expected to be 9 billion; all of them will need feeding but we don't yet produce nearly enough food to meet that demand. There are several ways we can try to square this circle; we can create more agricultural land by clearing forests or wetlands; we can change what we eat so that we eat less energy intensive foods, i.e. less beef, more chicken and grains; or we can try to force the land to give us more of a given produce per acre. The reality is that we'll probably end up doing all of these but one that I'm particularly interested in is producing more food from a given area of land, and specifically by using genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Attitudes to GMOs vary quite widely across the world but for some reason there seems to be a particularly strong resistance to the concept in much of Europe. France and Germany both have blanket bans, as do Austria, Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria and the Scottish Government has just recently come out against all GMOs. Other countries allow them but have such stringent regulations as to effectively ban them. Spain is a rare outlier where 20% of their maize is GMO. Even where it's legal any food set for human consumption must be labelled as GMO if it contains more then 1% GMO ingredients.

All this makes zero sense to me. The scientific case for the efficacy and safety of GMO food is now overwhelming. The argument against it consists of nothing more than an ad hoc mixture of anti-science/anti-intellectualism, a supposition that large biotech companies are somehow evil and the Natural Fallacy.  To be clear, there is nothing 'natural' about the crops or animals we currently eat. They have been selectively bred for thousands of years to an extent that if you saw the original cultivars you simply wouldn't recognise them. If a man in tweed with dirt under his nails lets two animals get jiggy on their own all of their genes are mixing randomly, like shuffling a deck of cards; this is apparently okay and safe (which, indeed, it is). If a man in a white coat very precisely selects one gene with a specific function and splices it into the exact position in the genome he wants this is apparently a 'frankenfood' and will lead to the demise of the universe.

A case in point. There is a GMO called Golden Rice. It was invented by a pleasant man by the name of Ingo Potrykus whom I had the pleasure to meet whilst at university. He found a way to express the genes needed to make Vitamin A in the grains of rice. Understand that these genes are already present in rice but they are normally only expressed uselessly in the inedible leaves. This GMO is significant because Vitamin A deficiency is a huge problem in the developing world, especially in Asia where 500,000 children are left blinded every year. Potrykus teamed up with the biotech company Syngenta who invested heavily in developing ever better lines. The best performing crops, along with all relevant patents were then donated, for free, to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project. The sole aim of this non-profit organisation is to give away, completely free of charge, seeds to the worlds poorest rice farmers who will be free to grow, harvest, sell on and reuse the seeds in whatever way they see fit.

It's a win-win, it really is. So it is especially galling to know that not one person has yet been helped by this new crop. It has taken well over a decade merely to get countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh to even allow trials to begin. This process has been fought tooth and nail at every step by organisations like Greenpeace who, to this day, continue to stand against Golden Rice. Their position is, frankly, despicable. Millions of children have been left to go blind because people in high places listen to scaremongering and ideology over logic and reason. This makes me sad. Fortunately, it should only now be a few more years until Golden Rice is approved in many developing countries and millions of people will very quickly feel the powerful benefit wrought by good science and genuine altruism.

Anyway, I appear to have gone on a rant instead of covering the article I wanted to mention; I'll come back to it tomorrow. And if you want to help, drop your local politician an email and tell them to listen to the scientists and start saving lives.

Continental Connection

It has been known for a long time that offspring of closely related individuals tend to be less healthy than those of unrelated individuals. Authors of a new paper note that even Charles Darwin speculated as to whether or not marrying his own first cousin (the couple had the same grandfather in pottery magnate Josiah Wedgewood) had a bearing on the mortality of some of his own children. The opposite idea has also been established, that offspring of distantly related individuals tend to fair better on many measures via a phenomenon known as hybrid vigour.

A new study in the journal Nature has tried to put some hard numbers on the concept. They looked at a total of 16 traits, ten covering various cardio-metabolic health factors along with height, lung function, cognitive ability and educational attainment. Curiously, none of the health measures saw an effect but each of the 4 others saw a positive correlation. Children from distantly related parents were taller, had larger lungs, stayed in school longer and scored better on cognitive tests. It's certainly possible that genetics is directly influencing these measures but let's keep in mind, though, that correlation is not the same as causation.

The strongest effect was seen between people of different continental groups so if you want tall, bright children you might want to find yourself a partner from a long, long way away.