Extract from ‘Gene Technology Bill’ Marathon
The Team from ‘Its in the Ballot’ held a 7 hour livestream marathon breaking down some submissions from the Gene Technology Bill: Including Scientists, Activists and long time GE Free Campaigners.
Jack Heinemann, PROFESSOR of GENETICs and MOLECULAR BIOLOGY at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, appeared with host, Laura Te Kiwi-Birb and Soraya Bradley
Here is a short extract of their hour long segment;
Extract
Soraya (summary): If my regenerative fields are contaminated with a GMO, unknown to me and my cows eat it, some indications are that can alter the proteins in their body and that they have been feeding on GMO GE is detectable in testing. I tried to establish liability framework with my insurance company and received back incoherent babble:
A possible scenario; I sell my cattle as GMO free, it goes off to export, on arrival a corruption is detected from GMO food, the export shipment is refused - then I am not going to get the $20,000 payment from works for my meat, I am going to be charged for disposal of contaminated shipment (say $40,000) and as whole shipment was refused am I also liable to other farmers who now also won’t get paid?
Is this realistic scenario Jack?
Professor Jack Heinemann: In some ways its more complicated than you just presented; They are making it possible to use gene technology in places and in organisms for which we’ve always traditionally used it in a containment facility.
And the importance of that is it won’t just be your cattle might be grazing on GM forage, worldwide that is already a phenomenon where cattle graze on GM forage and under certain jurisdictions you can distinguish between the cow being genetically engineered and its food being genetically engineered, I know that’s not everywhere, but somewhere and that’s some step towards this.
The threat to your business is even more complicated than that and the reason is because the biotechnology has advanced and became more efficient. and we call those gene editing reactions, the most efficient of our gene technologies. Now it’s the way in which we apply those gene editors has changed also in the last 15 years. there’s been a revolution in the chemistry and in the development of biological vectors that are used to deliver these gene editing tools into the cells of living organisms.
And we can do that now with such efficiency that you don’t need a laboratory.
You can package gene editors as pesticides and spray them from airplanes onto fields, and they won’t distinguish between a plant, a cow, a microbe, or a fungus or a human being. Those chemistries don’t know the difference. They are able to carry these gene editing tools into the cells of anything.
The most difficult of the organisms may still be plants. But they are still very good even with plants. And that’s what’s new since Hasno. We’ve always been able to do gene editing. We’ve had gene editing tools for bacteria, fungi, and animals since the late 1970’s.
So this is just hogwash, this idea that suddenly gene editing is a brand new type of technology. But the tools for delivering it efficiently have changed a lot. That means that your cattle themselves may be detected as genetically engineered if spray drift from the use of gene editors as a pesticide has contacted the flesh of your cattle while they were outside. And that residue may still be detectable in their cells after they have been slaughtered and sold as meat.Also all the microbes that are on them, that may contaminate the product but be fully acceptable in most trading regimes could also have been altered by the gene editing tools.
So it’s not that they may have had a history of eating a GMO, [your cows] may be in real time an actual GMO or contaminated with actual GMO’s. They are inseparable from them because of this unregulated use of the gene editors outside of the containment facility.
It’s in the Ballot: Marathon Livestream
It’s in the Ballot: Gene Technology Playlist ; Clips from the Livestream
