GMOs

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GMOs
A tale of manipulation, monopoly, Monsanto
and cheap food
Brian Ellis Michael Smith Laboratories UBC
October 24, 2008
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GMOs
What are they? What is really out
there? What impacts are they having? Where
are we going with them?
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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
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Mother Natures Genetic Engineer
Crown Gall (gall cells contain bacterial genes
in their genome)
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Agrobacterium carrying Roundup Ready gene in
an engineered bacterial plasmid
Roundup-tolerant
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GMOs
What are they? What is really out
there? What impacts are they having? Where
are we going with them?
7
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
Corn, cotton, soybeans, canola
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GM crop use is continually expanding
Nature Biotechnology 25 271 (2007)
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Which countries grow the most commercial GM crops?
USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada
Which countries grow no commercial GM crops?
EU, Japan, NZ
What are the developing countries doing about
GM crops?
India and China have begun to grow GM cotton
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GMOs
What are they? What is really out
there? What impacts are they having? Where
are we going with them?
11
Are there proven health impacts?
Are there fish genes in our tomatoes?
What about Golden Rice?
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Microarray analyses reveal that plant
mutagenesis may induce more transcriptomic
changes than transgene insertion Batista et al
Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci (USA) 1053640 (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
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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
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GMOs
What are they? What is really out
there? What impacts are they having? Where
are we going with them?
15
Homo sapiens has become the dominant species on
an increasingly over-exploited planet
16
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
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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
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Something not covered by the new Gene Technology
law