GMO (Genetically modified organisms) – Damnation or salvation? [Debate]

Let’s talk about GMO…wait! Do not go into berserk mode yet. I know you want to type the knowledge out of your keyboard but let me first feed the fire burning inside you with some facts. Then, you can, always respectfully, obliterate your fellow debaters with a critical factshot. In this post I will try to describe what exactly implies a GMO and debunk its main myths.

What is exactly a GMO?

When I say GMO a lot of people think about something resembling the Frankenstein fruit show in Figure 1. Something that is full of chemicals, bad stuff, cancer, run you fools! Calm down, nothing further from truth.

A GMO is an organism that has been genetically modified by introducing DNA from a different organism using recombinant DNA techniques. I will not explain what this techniques are today, just that they are based on DNA affinity properties which allow to play with DNA as if it was some kind of lego: you can split it, attach it, copy it… Now, what we are putting into the GMO is a new sequence of DNA that it did not have before, which will probably be translated into a protein that was not in the original organism (if you are not sure what DNA exactly is, please take a short look at this post).

As I explained in a previous post, the DNA composition of every living organism is the same! Therefore, in a GMO we are not introducing any new component, we are just putting a different SEQUENCE of DNA that it did not have previously. I cannot stress this enough, the new sequence of DNA will be made of the same nucleotides that the DNA of the rest of the organism, and the resulting protein will be made of the same amino acids.

NO CHEMICALS are introduced in a GMO, all are biochemical components, in fact just more DNA. Exclusively.

_{Figure 1. A crazy depiction of GMO which cannot not be further from truth. Source: http://naturalsociety.com/study-links-gmos-22-different-diseases/}

What examples of GMO are there?

Soybean

One of the most common GMO is soybean. It was modified with a gene extracted from a bacterium (1), that increases the tolerance to an insecticide. By itself, this gene is harmless, you probably eat millions of this bacteria, which are commonly found in plants, so you have eaten the resulting protein for sure. The GMO soybean can be treated with more insecticide which is a chemical with disputable health benefits. However, notice that the problem here is not the GMO itself, it is the insecticide!

Corn

Most of the corn has been genetically modified with a gene of another bacterium which provides it with resistance to insect pests (1). If the corn is resistant to insects, you need to use less insecticide. So, in this case, GMO equals less chemicals? Yes, welcome to the world of facts.

Plum

Plums have been modified with a gene extracted from a virus that gives them resistance to the same virus(1)! On a very simple level, the virus recognizes the plant as another virus and does not infect it. – Wait! So I am eating part of a virus? Can I get infected? - Absolutely not. First of all, you are eating just a protein of the virus, which, by the way, will probably get destroyed in your stomach, and a virus needs to be whole to infect. But the most important part is that virus are very specific in terms of hosts, a plant virus could never infect a human.

Here, it is important to notice that we have seen that each GMO has been modified in a different way, with different genes and different effects. Hence, don’t you think it is very difficult to say something like all GMO are bad, since they are all different?

The ugly truth

The truth is almost all your food is genetically modified. What? Don’t think so? Or so you think that 10 thousand years ago corn was as big as now? That bananas were this big, that cows produced as much milk as now, that watermelons were bigger than your head? Definitely no. All these have been selected by humans. Generation after generation we have crossed the bigger fruits among them and kept and bred the most productive cows, thus selecting the genes that were most favorable to us.

_{Figure 2. Original wild banana (left), banana bred for generations (right) to select for size and lack of seeds. Source: https://www.littlethings.com/agriculture-changed-fruits-vegetables/}

During this selection process, we do not know what changed in the DNA, we have zero control. On the other hand, with GMO we know precisely what is different and what are the results. But there is more, there are ways of creating GMOs that are legally not considered GMOs. At the beginning of this post I stated that a GMO incorporates a gene from another organism. However, you can still take out a gene, modify it (with certain techniques like random mutagenesis), and put it back again without having to label the resulting organism as GMO.

Debunking some myths

Okey, time to have some fun. For this part I searched GMO in google and opened random webs from the first page. Let’s see what I found:

_{Figure 2. I assume children turned into zombies by GMO-evil corn. Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/wysSm} .

The technology is unsafe

A lot of people think that the scientists behind recombinant DNA technology do not have any idea of the consequences of what they are doing and they just basically try doing stuff without thinking. FALSE. If you knew how much it takes to develop a GMO until it is legally accepted for commercialization you would know this is not true. It can take 5, 10 or even 20 years since a protein is discovered until is successfully introduced into an organism which then is legally accepted.

For example in this website, The non GMO project, in the first sentences they mention that GMOs are not stable. First of all, not stable refers to…what? Is the corn going to explode when I grab it? Is it going to turn into acid inside me and kill me? No. Moreover, in biology if something is unstable it dies, it does not turn poisonous. This is clearly a misconception of the technology behind GMOs. In this case, unstable probably refers to the fact that this genes might spread in the wild, something I will explain in a few paragraphs. However, in this website they did not specify the cause for this instability, thus playing with people’s fear and ignorance.

Regulation is required for food safety

As I have been proving along this article, there are no safety issues with GMOs. With insecticides, herbicides and the rest? Definitely. They should be regulated, but then the GMO is not the problem itself. We have seen that some GMO even help reduce their use!

For example, the website Natural society links GMO to 22 illnesses. First of all, do not trust a website with a name like that, because it is probably trying to get more clicks with a natural name. Not all natural things are good, try snake venom. -Sorry, I get overexcited-.

In this website they basically contradict themselves: First they say that all GMO should be banned but then they state than the insecticide known as Glyphosate is the cause of the problems. Glyphosate has been in truth link to cancer and other illnesses. But again, the GMO is not the problem! Regulate the glyphosate!

This people that advocate for the banning of all GMOs do not make sense, since it is known that the cause of the health problems is the glyphosate. There is a high correlation between people driving cars and people getting brutally killed. Should we ban cars? No! We should stop drinking and driving, looking at the mobile phone, taking drugs and using the car. Hence, regulate the chemicals used in agriculture not the GMOs, which are perfectly safe.

Oh! By the way, all your antibiotics, antibodies against cancer and some beers are produced by GMOs, not only food.

Real GMO problems

Nobody is perfect. GMOs have helped increased manifold the agricultural production in the world without having to use more land and resources, but they also have some drawbacks.

First of all, most of the genetic modifications confer survival advantages to the GMO. The fact that plants can easily exchange DNA presents some risks. For example, the spread of herbicide tolerance genes into the wild could result in the creation of weeds that cannot be killed. Hence, they could grow and take over agricultural land killing our crops. This lack of propagation control is one of the main risks.

Secondly, most of the GMOs are patented by private companies. Although they have more than significantly helped to increase production, it has been at the cost of a partial shifting of the control over food supply to private companies. For example, Monsanto.

Conclusions

In my opinion GMOs are inherently safe, the technology behind it is well known (we have been doing recombinant DNA since 1973 (2) ) and undergoes a lot of controls. However, some GMOs are linked to higher use of herbicides and other chemical products that might cause health problems.

Your turn now! What do you think? Are you pro - GMO or are you against it? Why?

Hope you liked it! Could you think about other arguments? Mentioned them in the comments! If you want to learn or discuss about more biotech hot topics follow me!

Bibliography

1 - https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetically-modified-organisms-gmos-transgenic-crops-and-732
2- https://medium.com/lsf-magazine/the-invention-of-recombinant-dna-technology-e040a8a1fa22
3 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-genetically-modified-food/