GMOs A tale of manipulation, monopoly, Monsanto and cheap food Brian Ellis Michael Smith Laboratories UBC October 24, 2008

GMOs What are they? What is really out there? What impacts are they having? Where are we going with them?

GMOs What are they? What is really out there? What are they doing to us? Where are we going with them? GMOs are organisms whose genome has been permanently manipulated by direct insertion of one or more genes that were not there before

‘Crown Gall’ (gall cells contain bacterial genes in their genome) Mother Nature’s Genetic Engineer + Agrobacterium tumefaciens

Agrobacterium carrying “Roundup Ready” gene in an ‘engineered’ bacterial plasmid Monsanto’s“Roundup Ready®” gene Roundup ® -tolerant Roundup ® -sensitive

GMOs What are they? What is really out there? What impacts are they having? Where are we going with them?

GMO crops Commercial Applications Altered agronomic traits for industrial producers Disease/insect resistance Virus resistance Herbicide resistance Salt/drought tolerance Cold tolerance Enhanced yields, other quantitative traits Application of Roundup herbicide Field following application time 2008 Corn, cotton, soybeans, canola

Nature Biotechnology 25: 271 (2007) GM crop use is continually expanding

Which countries grow the most commercial GM crops? Which countries grow no commercial GM crops? EU, Japan, NZ USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada What are the ‘developing countries’ doing about GM crops? India and China have begun to grow GM cotton Science Sept. 08, 2008

GMOs What are they? What is really out there? What impacts are they having? Where are we going with them?

Are there fish genes in our tomatoes? What about ‘Golden Rice’? Are there proven health impacts?

Microarray analyses reveal that plant mutagenesis may induce more transcriptomic changes than transgene insertion Batista et al Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci (USA) 105:3640 (2008) “We found that the improvement of a plant variety through the acquisition of a new desired trait, using either mutagenesis or transgenesis, may cause stress and thus lead to an altered expression of untargeted genes. In all of the cases studied, the observed alteration was more extensive in mutagenized than in transgenic plants.” 11,267 (51) genes vs. 2,318 (25) genes

Intensive GM crop use also modifies the ecology of our agricultural landscape... …but we have been massively modifying this ecology for the past 10,000 years

GMOs What are they? What is really out there? What impacts are they having? Where are we going with them?

Homo sapiens has become the dominant species on an increasingly over-exploited planet

Humans directly exploit ~70% of temperate and tropical ecosystems Agriculture~50% Commercial forests~20% Human settlements~20% The greatest single activity affecting native ecosystem structure and function is agriculture

Increasing human population size and aspirations are putting unsustainable pressure on the biomass productivity of the planet This will drive even wider adoption and extension of GMO technology as human societies struggle to cope with loss of productive land / water resources and the associated food shortages

Something not covered by the new Gene Technology law…