Great Britain, which put a blanket ban on all GM crops in 2004, is now beginning to grant new applications for field trials of bioengineered crops, and British scientists are pushing for allowances to conduct even more GM research. A policy shift among European Union member states would be particularly significant, as most of the global food trade is affected, directly or indirectly, by European regulations. An EU move towards acceptance of GM foods would undoubtedly inundate global markets with bioengineered crops, much to the chagrin of the many protesters in both the United States and abroad.

AP

Scientists can engineer seeds that are drought resistant, can withstand harsh chemicals, or that contain extra vitamins.

The debate about the safety of GM foods isn’t going to end any time soon, in Europe or the United States. Here at home, though, debate over the benefits and potential pitfalls of the technology must be framed around the fact that engineered seeds have to pass through the screening procedures of three different agencies, a more rigorous testing procedure than any other food undergoes.

In 1986, the United States established the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology, which describes what safety requirements each agency is accountable for monitoring and the intricate detail in which the agencies must work together. The U.S. Department of Agriculture evaluates the seed’s agricultural safety, while the Environmental Protection Agency assesses hazards the new crop might hold for the environment. The Food and Drug Administration ensures that the crop (with its newly engineered protein falling into the “food additive” category) is safe to eat.

While this battery of evaluations is by no means foolproof, it does ensure that genetically engineered foods that make it to our tables are at least as safe, by any testable standard, as other foods on the market. Critics of genetically modified crops, however, raise other issues. They point out that most of the genetically modified seeds that are sold are engineered to be resistant the high levels of pesticides or herbicides. This use of such technology only furthers the interests of the corporations who produce the seeds and, invariably, the chemicals for which they have resistance. It also encourages farmers to use a heavy hand when applying these toxic chemicals to their fields.

Others worry about the lack of definitive tests to ensure the safety of genetically modified foods. The concern is that the engineered crops could produce surprising toxins, or that the spliced-in DNA might escape the digestion process in our stomachs and fuse with our DNA or the DNA of our gut flora, causing mayhem. The list of concerns goes on, and every blog or news outlet will provide a different spin.

Certainly, there are issues to be addressed by policymakers. Foods containing GMOs are not currently labeled, and it is thought that as much as 70 percent of all processed foods on the shelves in American grocery stores contain GM ingredients. Some groups have suggested that there should be some system requiring labels for these products to enable consumers to make informed choices about their food purchases.

Before that could happen, though, there would need to be a better system for keeping engineered seeds from infiltrating organic crops. One of the biggest contentions farmers have with engineered seeds is their tendency, like any other seed, to drift. Many organic farmers have found high percentages (frequently over 20 percent) of their crops to be contaminated with GM seed. One solution might be to establish GMO-free zones, like those in place in California, to allow organic farmers to raise their crops without worry of contamination from nearby farms.

While U.S. farmers, the media, concerned parents, and all the other interest groups continue to go back and forth on this issue, there is a global dimension to the debate that policymakers must also weigh. In small areas of Africa, farmers have introduced seeds engineered to increase the crop yield and the nutrition of those yields. These crops can be a huge source of relief in parts of the developing world where malnutrition affects over 800 million people, a number that will only continue to increase with the rapidly growing global population and the skyrocketing costs of food.

Plants that are engineered to have higher levels of essential vitamins or nutrients help children develop properly and help adults keep their immune systems healthy. Crops engineered to be drought resistant or have higher yields can help stem the global food shortage while bringing much needed income to poor farmers. The first step in any long-term solution to the food crisis is to increase the self-sufficiency of starving populations. This can be partially accomplished by giving farmers access to improved seeds.

At the heart of the matter, the debate over genetically modified crops is really two separate issues. Much of the genetic engineering done on crops in the United States improves the crops’ ability to withstand powerful chemicals. The genetic engineering that could contribute to the malnourishment problem in the developing world improves crops’ ability to feed people. Thus the debate over GMO foods should be conducted as two debates.

The first: whether chemical companies are using biotechnology to sell more of their product and maintain a stronghold on seed technologies and thus agricultural production. And the second: whether supporting the use of biotechnology is an appropriate means to help solve an urgent humanitarian problem that will continue to grow if the global community doesn’t act aggressively. After all, the majority of processed foods in the United States contain some genetically modified ingredients that over the past two decades have not resulted in any immediate adverse health effects, but malnutrition kills ten million people a year. The seeds of this biotechnology have already been sown; it is now our responsibility to make sure we utilize them for good.

When it comes to enhancing athletic performance, where, then, is the line between laser eye surgery and anabolic steroid use? Certainly there is a broad spectrum between the two, but at what point does performance enhancement stop being acceptable?

This was one of the many questions raised by the panelists Friday at a Center for American Progress event. Michael Werner, President of The Werner Group, postulated that for many Americans the line of unacceptability is drawn at chemical enhancements, as opposed to surgical or equipment-based ones.

Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that drugs and even drastic equipment improvements can undermine continuity, something we value in our sports. We can no longer compare modern sports heroes to stars of the past (or even to their own prior performances) if modern athletes artificially enhance their performance.

The natural limitation of humans, Caplan says, is what differentiates between a “performance” and an “exhibition.” While we might be interested in watching jumping competitions between two men with rocket-boosted legs, we probably wouldn’t consider it sport or attribute the winner’s victory to his training or athleticism. Consider the baseball player who uses drugs to enable him to hit massive amounts of home runs. In his case we lose the sense of baseball’s history and cannot clearly distinguish what part of his record is athletic performance and what is exhibition.

Another concern about doping is safety. Gary I. Wadler, M.D., chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Prohibited List and Methods Sub-Committee, presented statistics showing that children are using anabolic steroids younger and younger in order to ape their heroes. High school athletes especially turn to steroids as a response to intense pressure to perform from parents, coaches, and scouts. Caplan said that this pressure amounts to coercion when applied to adults who could otherwise be assumed to have free choice.

Noah Walker, a consultant at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former professional baseball player, confirmed that the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs makes it very difficult to compete because the players who use are often heavily rewarded with playing time and lucrative contracts.

One major problem is that, even if legislators and health officials could agree on what types of enhancements should be illegal, most of them are incredibly difficult to detect. A recent Nature article, “The Science of Doping” reports an unacceptably high false-positive rate in the types of drug tests that Olympians take in Beijing.

Yet testing for enhancement will likely become more difficult. Wadler and Caplan both agreed that the enhancement of the future will be “gene doping,” something we will probably encounter before the 2012 Olympics. Drugs may be difficult to test for accurately, but imagine testing athletes for tweaked DNA or extra cells. Clearly, we need better science to test for doping if we want to preserve the sports we love.

Effect Measure goes where few other dare and questions the validity of the Ivins fiasco, not once but twice this week. The evidence is the same as what the mainstream media presents, but the authors arrive at a different conclusion from the FBI’s.

Joe Romm, writing at Science Blog’s Next Generation of Energy Ideas blog, explains that if we don’t stem the flood of carbon pouring out of coal-fired power plants, nothing else we do to stop climate change will matter.

Mira Kolodkin at SEA’s blog covers the FDA’s inability to adequately follow up on illegal uses of drugs and comments on the GAO’s suggestion of a tracking system to help the FDA respond to complaints of violations more efficiently.

Brandon Keim at Wired touches on the bioethical implications of cloning Booger and comments on misconceptions about personhood. He explains that Booger, like people, was more than his genes.

Spanish company Abengoa Solar has said they will pull the plug on a 280-megawatt solar-thermal plant currently planned in Arizona if the Senate does not pass the full eight-year extension, as the company expects it will take six years for them to get online (and thus, for the tax credits to apply). Sempra Generation has stated that a plan to develop 500 megawatts of solar power is contingent on the extension of the tax credits. To put that in perspective, approximately 150 megawatts of grid-connected photovoltaic capacity was installed in the United States in 2007. The expiration of the tax credits would also dampen the growth and innovation of the wind industry, which grew by 45 percent last year and, thanks in part to T. Boone Pickens, is expected to grow even more in the next few years.

Congress may be reluctant to pass legislation that will cost taxpayers more money. According to Time, an extension of the credit will cost taxpayers about $1 billion (equivalent, as the article points out, to about half a week of the Iraq war). But the cost to taxpayers is paltry compared to the cost of not encouraging the renewable industry. One consulting company reports that the expiration of the tax credit could result in the loss of 116,000 jobs and $19 billion of investments.

Effect Measure wonders if the unpublished CDC study reporting that up to 50 percent more Americans have HIV than we thought was just another victim of the administration’s suppression.

Michael Stebbins posted on Scientists and Engineers for America’s blog about the new, searchable OTA archive and included a video of Rush Holt talking about why OTA was awesome.

JR Minkel on Scientific American comments on a study (which is hotly contested by the IMF) that finds a correlation between IMF loans and tuberculosis deaths.

Bioethics.net’s Summer Johnson draws our attention to a particularly undesirable effect of high gas prices: cuts in home health services.

Curtis Brainard at CJR provides a very thorough analysis of the renewed interest in GM crops and their potential to solve the food crisis.

Kaid Benfield at NRDC’s Switchboard chides the environmental movement for failing to be more vocal about obesity and its environmental causes, and later in the week posts about how Google Maps can now help.

This was the main message at a Capitol Hill briefing on global health and climate change yesterday hosted by the Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming and the Congressional Global Health Caucus. Panelists included Michael St. Louis from the Centers for Disease Control, Paul Epstein from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, and Pablo Suarez, a researcher on climate change and disasters for Oxfam America and Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre. They spoke about severe weather events that are already changing the quality of life for many in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia and emphasized that competition for land and water, and ensuing intertribal and international conflict, will only intensify in coming years due to an increasing world population and the mounting effects of global warming.

The panelists emphasized the need for adaptation policies to deal with these effects. Suarez provided an example of a village he has visited that, after several larger-than-normal floods, has switched from chickens to ducks as their main source of food, but many more adaptations are necessary to protect human health. Even if humans could stop emitting greenhouse gases today, we would continue to feel the effects of climate change for many years to come. To accompany the ambitious policies that are undoubtedly required to slow global warming, we also need to address the very real public health concerns that, according to Suarez, are already on the rise.

But the briefing was disappointingly incomplete in one major area, as it failed to address to health impacts that Americans will feel due to climate change. Epstein has been writing about the hazardous effect climate change will have on Americans’ health for years, but neglected to bring that to the conversation. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report last week detailing the impacts climate change will have on the health of Americans, even as the agency announced it will continue to respond with inaction. Any movement on the issue will have to come from Congress, but without evidence that the health effects will reach industrialized nations, legislators and the public will feel little urgency.

When asked point blank about vulnerabilities in the United States, the most compelling example the panel offered is the increased number of asthma cases in inner city youth. However, the CDC Policy on Climate Change and Public Health offers up plenty of health concerns that are more severe and widespread, including vector-, food-, and water-borne diseases, as well as drowning and loss of property due to extreme weather events. A recent analysis even estimates that as a result of dehydration caused by warmer temperatures in the United States, there could be 2.25 million additional kidney stone cases each year, which would weigh down the health care industry with as much as $1.3 billion in additional annual treatment costs by 2050.

If activists want to change policy, these are the sorts of effects they need to hammer. Historically, the plight of sub-Saharan Africans or inner-city youth has not inspired the same fervent action as threats to the American way of life.

Moderator Edward Cameron of the World Bank was right to express his excitement that a focus on health can open up a new and influential avenue of discussion about climate change, just as the Stern Report did. For that focus to be effective though, it needs to be tailored to the audience.

We are still learning to what extent our genomes influence our health and we still have lots of gaps to fill in our coverage of genetic privacy. GINA was an important first step, and we are fortunate to be able to draw on European experience to guide future legislation.

SOURCE: Flickr/Andrew Huff

Embryonic stem cell research, strong scientific input on global warming policy, and more federal funding for scientific research: these are all things the American public wants.

Recent polling shows that 80 percent of survey respondents think the federal government should fund scientific research, “even if it brings no immediate benefits.” According to Ruy Teixeria at the Center for American Progress, opinion polls also indicate that while President Bush thinks embryonic stem cell research is morally unacceptable, fewer and fewer Americans agree with him each year. In 2002, a Gallup poll revealed that 54 percent of Americans found embryonic stem cell research morally acceptable. In 2007, 64 percent were on board. That number is even higher when framed in the context of specific diseases embryonic stem cell research could help cure. Yet federal funding policies continue to limit stem cell research in this country.

The disparities between current federal funding and the amount of funding Americans think should go towards scientific research might be narrowed if we just listened to our scientists. The polls show that the American public want scientists to have more of a say in policy when it comes to issues like global warming, stem cell research, and genetically modified food. Scientists, survey takers feel, are more informed and more impartial decisionmakers than business leaders, religious leaders, or politicians. In fact, Teixeria found that Americans express a higher level of confidence in the leadership of the scientific community than they do in any other institution besides the military. You can read the full report on “What the Public Really Wants on Science” on the CAP website.

John Cahill of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, reminded Congress that piracy is not a victimless crime. Healthcare and pensions for stagehands, TV producers, animators, and even hair and make-up stylists depend in part on the residuals received from the sale of DVDs. His testimony was a jarring reminder that even when the artists themselves assert that file sharing doesn’t hurt, others in the industry are affected.

Stanford Professor Emeritus John Barton noted that the issue of intellectual property rights is a complex international issue, especially when it comes to climate change technology and medical advancements. He stated that international IP policy “is about global allocation of the cost of research. It is certainly reasonable that other wealthy nations should not be entitled to a free ride on the benefits of U.S. research, but it is also reasonable that the poor should not have to pay as large a share of those research costs as the wealthy.” The reminder that responding to crises, be they food, medical, or climate, is the responsibility of an industrialized nation in an increasingly borderless world tempered the tone of a hearing that was otherwise focused on the injustice of piracy.

Overall this brief hearing highlighted problems we’ve been talking about for years without offering much new discussion. Cahill, Kindler, and Lack all expressed a need for more resources and more enforcement, but none provided clarity as to what agency is responsible for this enforcement or what form it should take. What we really need is a more substantive discussion about IP protection that also addresses the urgent needs of developing nations for access to drugs and efficient technology. At the request of Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), Barton and Kindler promised to collaborate in search of the appropriate balance of property rights and technology sharing and report back in a month. We look forward to hearing their proposed solutions.

They examine studies of seven susceptibility alleles with low penetrance, or a small likelihood of causing a disease that individually play a very small role in increasing a woman’s risk for breast and ovarian cancer, but can have a significant cumulative effect. They do not examine low-frequency, high-penetrance mutations in genes like BRCA1 and 2, which increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, or TP53, which suppresses tumor formation. The study focused on an analysis of just how significant the cumulative effect of multiple mutations is and whether it is worth changing screening procedures in order to target women with a higher-than-average level of risk due to genetic predisposition.

This study, along with an increasing number of papers which identify cancer-susceptibility genes and meta-studies which analyze the statistical significance of those genes, focus attention on the question of how knowledge of our genes will shape public health in the future. The Pharoah article discussed several scenarios for screening programs and concluded that it would be possible and cost-effective to genotype every woman in the United Kingdom at all known susceptibility alleles and recommend personalized screening routines regarding what age the women should begin to get mammograms. Based on genetic susceptibility, the study concludes that only 0.1 percent of women in the United Kingdom should begin annual screenings at the age of 40, which is the current recommendation.

This targeted approach to cancer screening might save money, but there are certainly several obstacles to implementation of a measure like this in the United Kingdom, the United States, or anywhere else, including the issue of how to reach every woman in the population and how to insure the privacy promised in the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act while still delivering personalized screening recommendations. Nevertheless, our small but steadily increasing understanding of our genome ensures that more tests and treatments in the future will be tailored to our personal genetic makeup. As the Pharoah article concludes, “Policymakers should start to consider how this knowledge could be used to make a polygenic approach to disease prevention a reality.”

The good news: because of this gap in federal action, some states such as California, New Hampshire, and Florida have stepped up to the challenge and put their own policies in action to try to reduce GHG emissions. The bad news: the actions of states alone will not be enough. A report put out by the Pew Center asserts that federal policy is necessary to encourage the innovation that will lead to cleaner energy technology, to create a national mandate, and to involve the United States in international dialogue on climate policy.

It is obvious that the next administration will have a lot of work to catch the United States up on emissions reductions. Hopefully it will take the urgency of the situation seriously and make aggressive emissions policies a first priority come January.

Stern also defended the discount rate he uses to estimate the economic impact of climate change from criticism. In economic analysis, discount rates determine the value of future costs and benefits. The Stern Review uses a discount rate close to zero, indicating that we should place nearly the same value on the well being of those alive in the year 2200 as we do on those alive today. Stern states that “discounting the future simply because it is the future is to adopt the value judgment that we should a priori care less about future lives…the approach of treating people with different birthdays in an equal way is a direct invocation of a notion of equality that is standard in most treatments of justice and rights.” Stern’s discount rate sparked a flurry of discussion about appropriate discounting, and Stern’s testimony was designed to unite economists around the idea that “even if we were to use much higher discounting, the higher risk of severe damages would imply that the overall numbers on cost do not change significantly from the original results of the Stern Review.” Basically, whether or not you agree with the value Stern places on the well being of your great-great-great-great-grandchildren, the science supports his plea for immediate and drastic policy.

The basis of Stern’s analysis rests on accurate predictions of future GHG emissions and the corresponding global temperature increase. Stern frames the balance of faith in and skepticism of the science behind his analysis as a modern Pascal’s Wager: “The common sense analysis of risk is clear. If we assume the science is right, and act correspondingly, and it turns out to be wrong, we will have some new technologies and a cleaner and safer world. If we assume the science is wrong and delay action and it turns out to be right, then we will be unable, except at a very high cost, to back out.” That means that even if an individual does not understand or accept the scientific evidence on global warming (like some members of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality), policy that will lead the way towards cleaner, more efficient technology is still the responsible choice.

The House Education and Labor Committee passed the bill, H.R. 3036, on June 18. It includes provisions for increased funding for environmental education programs and teacher development. No word yet on how, if passed, NCLI will effect national testing standards or the disproportionately small amount of time focused on science in many elementary classrooms.