Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 It's in the shadow of genetically engineered crops, right? People are immediately suspicious of this because genetic engineering has become so politically controversial. So we would try early on to figure out, okay, how could we do this new technology in a way that it would not come off as this profit mongering thing that's gonna hurt everybody. And most people who were involved in it were academics because there wasn't really much of a profit to be made by this thing.
Speaker 2 00:00:35 Welcome to another episode of GMO. Watch on your host Emily journey. I'm curious about GMOs and why I choose to eat organic and non GMO foods. My guests and I are going to break down the hype from the facts around GMOs in our food so that you can come to your own conclusions about what you want to eat.
Speaker 3 00:00:59 My guest today is Dr. Fred gold. Dr. Gold is the director of the graduate training program on agricultural biotechnology at North Carolina state university. He's also the university's co-director of the genetic engineering and society center as an entomologist, Dr. Gold studies, the sustainable use of insect resistant crops and genetically engineered agricultural PEs. One of my goals is to make scientists and what they have to say relatable to people like myself who are just going about their regular shopping routine, looking at labels and ingredients and making decisions about what they eat. You are a highly respected scientist.
Speaker 0 00:01:48 You
Speaker 3 00:01:49 Are. I mean, I have in my notes here that the national academy of sciences selected you to chair a study, covering the risks and benefits of GMOs, but I get that right. Okay. And so you came out the GMO foods have no greater risk of cancer or other health conditions than foods without GMOs. That's what was the conclusion? Right.
Speaker 0 00:02:12 Well, we'll have to be careful, you know, there's that whole thing about doing sciences. So we said that we found no substantiated evidence. There was that effect, but you know, recognize that if eating GMOs caused you to live two years less or caused you to live two years more, we'd never know in the same, are you going to have people talk about, oh, the Mediterranean diet and this diet,
Speaker 3 00:02:36 The keto
Speaker 0 00:02:37 Diet. I mean, it's very hard to find subtle differences just because we're human beings and we are not experimental animals, right.
Speaker 3 00:02:46 We are out of control, right.
Speaker 0 00:02:49 That's not going to happen. Right. So the best we can do is look at all the information that's available to us. Whether the report that you're talking about was published in 2016. So it's a bit dated right now. Not, you know, in terms of the crops that the food that you eat it's about the same as it was. And there are a couple of new things that we could talk about, but mostly it's the same as it was. And we were careful to think, okay, well, what could be missing in the data? So we looked at the studies very carefully. Now we found some problems in some of the studies. It's not like we just give this cart, launched it. Oh, everything's great. We wanted to be a different voice in that. So we looked at everything we call with fresh eyes to, and we look at some of the studies that would have said that there were problems, you know, that it really would be bad for your health, that cancer rates would double all those kinds of things. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:03:42 Well that sounds outlandish just on the surface that cancer rates would double.
Speaker 0 00:03:47 Yeah. When you're concerned about something and somebody feeds into that, you know, if it's part of you're already concerned, right? You don't trust the government.
Speaker 3 00:03:57 It's my hand for that one. I don't trust the government. Just FYI.
Speaker 0 00:04:04 Well, I mean, these are the big things. You know, one thing I always point out to people that in China, they have almost a hundred percent genetically engineered cotton. None of their rice or their corn is genetically engineered. The Chinese government really likes the idea of genetic engineering. And I know researchers there and stuff, but the Chinese populace doesn't trust the government. There have been these scares, you know, with foods in China that have, have been adulterated. And so there's a lack of trust. And apparently there's a big green peace movement in China. You know, we always think of them, you know, the top-down government, but there's a lot going on in countries like that. And that issue of trust in the government. So one of the goals in all of this and in our study is to figure out how to be trustworthy. How do you gain the trust of people like me?
Speaker 0 00:04:57 If you asked me, how does my cell phone work and does it give me cancer? I can say, I don't think so, but I have no way to judge. If my cell phone is going to give me cancer, I have to trust somebody. And so I think that's that question of, if you're going to do something you want to build trustworthiness into it. And actually one of the things in our committee was that we invited all of the people who have expressed these concerns about cancer and other things, as well as people who really hate them because of the monopolistic kind of issues. We invited all of those people to come to the national academy of sciences and talk about what they were concerned about. So that right when we started the study, we'd see, these are the concerns and try to address what people are worried about. Not just do a report anyway. I mean, it's always so hard to gain trust. And there are always people who don't like what you're saying, who will try to take away that trust. There's
Speaker 3 00:05:57 Always a benefit on some side, right? So there's money to be made in every angle. I truly believe that. I like what you said about resistance to some technologies that are small, hard to understand and powerful. And in terms of like you were using a Spiderman example, right? So the spider is small, hard to understand powerful consequences, you know, to Spiderman. So, and GMOs are like that they're small and hard to understand and powerful. Right, right, right. Insects are like that too.
Speaker 0 00:06:40 So that was all the thing was Spiderman was that, you know, before the year two thousands, the spider had been exposed to radiation, which is also small. Right. What everybody, you know, with the atomic bomb up in, you know, in the 1960s and everything. So Spiderman got his powers from something nobody understands right. Atomic hour and the spider somehow gave that atomic power to him.
Speaker 3 00:07:06 Oh, that's funny in that earlier comic book version.
Speaker 0 00:07:10 Yeah. And you could see sort of a demarkation line where it switches. So if you ask any high school kid, what was the spider that bit fighter, man, it was one that had been genetically engineered and it transfer genes. But if you ask old people like me,
Speaker 3 00:07:28 It was the radiation,
Speaker 0 00:07:29 There was the radiation. So we've just switched from one scary technology to another scary technology.
Speaker 3 00:07:37 That makes sense to me, you're an entomologist and the science of insects. And I remember listening to you in an interview, talk about genetic engineering with insects in order to reduce the use of pesticides. And is that a real thing?
Speaker 0 00:07:56 Yeah. So it is a real thing and it is not without controversy. So genetically engineered crops, right? All these huge companies have been involved in that. It's a real profit motive and you know, that came off and it was sort of Monsanto, right. Pushed it on people. And then all of a sudden, you know, started to engineer insects for research purposes. Then it turned out, well, gee, maybe you could engineer insects so that they couldn't transmit diseases like daggy or malaria. Right. So, Hmm, that sounds good. Or you could engineer insect pests to sort of basically get rid of their own populations to basically be their own little time bomb. So you released some of them into the field and they spread. And then after a while all the insects die. So this is again a powerful, weird technology and it involves bugs and it involves disease.
Speaker 0 00:08:53 And it's in the shadow of genetically engineered crops, right? People are immediately suspicious of this because it's genetic engineering has become so politically controversial. So we would try early on to figure out, okay, how could we do this new technology in a way that it would not come off as this profit mongering thing that's gonna hurt everybody. And most people who were involved in it were academics because there wasn't really much of a profit to be made by this thing. And so there was a lot more interaction with the public about it, but still there was one small startup company that got involved in this and they genetically engineered the mosquito that transmits stanky, and also Zika virus years ago, they wanted to release these in Florida. And there was all this human cry and it didn't happen. But actually this spring, they have permission to release these
Speaker 3 00:09:57 No way this spring in Florida.
Speaker 0 00:10:01 Yeah. Probably sometime in may or so. Yeah. There's still some community people who are against it and it's in the Florida keys, but not in key west. Right. You know, I think that wouldn't have happened.
Speaker 3 00:10:15 It's not just theory and not just laboratory stuff. So it's going to really happen. And the way it's applied executed is by releasing insects into the wild and you can't take them back.
Speaker 0 00:10:30 So it's an interesting thing. The ones that are being released as a curious approach,
Speaker 3 00:10:36 Doing
Speaker 0 00:10:41 The fluorescent,
Speaker 3 00:10:45 I would believe that, is that true? Yes.
Speaker 0 00:10:48 Wow. It's a marker at any event. I mean, there's all sorts of things that sound pretty bizarre, but are actually being done all the time. These insects that would be released, the females do not survive, but the males survive or you release these to males. And those males mate, with females, they produce male offspring, but no female offspring. And if you keep doing that, keep releasing, you wind up with a population that has no females. And that's the end of it. I mean, that's the goal. I mean, this is a much more complicated in a sense that it's not so easy to do this, of course, but if you stop releasing after a while those genes disappear, the next stage and that technology, which is really being funded by the gates foundation, mostly in a lab at Imperial college in London is developing the mosquito that transmits malaria to get rid of its populations. But in that case, you release the insects and they push out these genes into a population by a thing called gene drive. And it goes into the population after one release and it does stay and spread. So that's a whole different strategy, but you can imagine what that one, that the gates foundation is funding. There's no business model for that, right? Because you make this thing and then you release it. That's the last time you ever could sell it, right. Because it's on its way. How
Speaker 3 00:12:14 Am I going to make money off of that? Right.
Speaker 0 00:12:16 So obviously that's a different motivation there. Then there was from Monsanto now in terms of that other release that I mentioned in Florida there, if you don't keep releasing them, they don't have an effect. So there is a somewhat of a sales kind of thing that could be done with those perhaps, but you know, all in all, it's not huge business in that way
Speaker 3 00:12:40 For this release in Florida, this spring, how quickly do you imagine that you would start seeing
Speaker 0 00:12:48 That's a good question. They apparently have a permit to do these releases over a two year period. And my sense is it would take about six months to see the impact, right? Because you have to wait until it moves itself into the populations. Unfortunately, unlike insecticides, you know, if all of a sudden there's a dengue outbreak in Florida, you know, this virus gone through, you need to stop that immediately. You can't just all of a sudden say, okay, let me build a factory and really sold these insects. It wouldn't work, but more of a preventative thing. And they've done these contests in Brazil where they've done these releases and had some success. I have some questions about how, how feasible this is going to be, but we'll see for based on these testing. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:13:34 Do you have any concerns that the insect population would develop a resistance to the genetic engineering?
Speaker 0 00:13:43 Yes, I do. Yeah. As a matter of fact, there is even already evidence that insects can develop a resistance to these kinds of technologies. You know, some people worry that, oh, they're going to take over the world. And other people feel like once they get out of the laboratory, they're going to just plunk. So in terms of this specific thing in Florida, the mechanism by which this works, there can be selection for genes that don't let the female be affected by it. And so if that happens, you'll wind up with a population where you release all of these, but then the males and females survive. So it is very possible. And they'll find that out and doing these.
Speaker 3 00:14:26 Does that seem risky creating a crazy monster mosquito?
Speaker 0 00:14:31 Yeah. To me, it wouldn't be a crazy monster mosquito, would you be the same old crappy mosquito this,
Speaker 3 00:14:39 Okay. So not something that would introduce new problems.
Speaker 0 00:14:44 I don't think so. Again, you know, all of these things are things that the regulatory agencies need to be careful about. Right. They need to think about it. And I think they have been concerned. One of the concerns is that the strain they release may be different in whether it is resistant to insecticides or whether it transmits a new disease or something like that. So there are some of these questions that come up.
Speaker 3 00:15:09 I mean, there's this idea that I've heard discussed about just from other scientists who, who feel strongly against GMOs, genetic engineering, you know, when it comes to crops and insects, this idea of unforeseen consequences. And for that being kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, and then it's not really possible to account for all of the variations, all of the possibilities. And that, that alone is enough reason to not go down these paths. Right. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 0 00:15:45 Yeah. One of the questions is what is the cost of inaction, right? So right now in Florida, people pay their tax dollars to pray for mosquitoes, spraying insecticides. So you could, of course, I asked, well, what is the consequences of all that sprain? And it's become resistant to one sector science. So they use a new insecticide now. So how does that affect your children compared to this technology that just focuses on one insect and should have no other effects, especially because that insect, that mosquito called eighties chip tire, the yellow fever mosquito is invasive. It's not a native us species, so it's not like you're taking something out of the environment that was always there. So these are good questions and you have to ask them carefully and come back with the evidence. But as you say, you'll never know for sure there are a lot of these questions that we can't answer, but again, you know, if you go and think about Africa and malaria devastating, how bad would the impact of getting rid of this mosquito on the ecosystem be compared to the loss of life, right?
Speaker 0 00:16:58 And then you have to ask, you know, what happens if we wipe out malaria? What does that do to the wealth of people whose, you know, as some people have said, malaria is bad because it kills people, but it's worse because it, you know, takes away people's energy, right? You know, they have a hard time making a livelihood if you're tired all the time. So those are complicated issues. And I think getting at the data is really important and being as upfront as possible about what these consequences are. And I think things that bother conservation people in the United States or in Europe are different than things that affect African people or in different situations.
Speaker 3 00:17:38 So I see bugs that I didn't see when I was younger a certain time of year, we get stinkbugs. They come in the house, they're creepy. I never had this problem even as early as 10 years ago. Right. This was not a thing for me. And then also these different type of lady bugs that are not as cute and pretty as the ones I remember from my childhood, they looked different. I don't even know what those are. And I see those and I don't really know why they're here. I'm just grasping at straws. And this is like, so I blame things like, oh, this is because of pesticides. It's because of genetic engineering. Do you know what's causing range?
Speaker 0 00:18:23 Well, I do know that local trade is one of the big issues. So we have one mosquito that going after, and Florida has a very close relative. That's in the same genus, right. They're closely related that we now have in the United States called the tiger mosquito. Where are you located? I know
Speaker 3 00:18:42 I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:18:44 But the tiger mosquito is an interesting, is a little white stripes on its legs. You'll see it around is active during the day. And, uh, that's here because of the trade in used tires.
Speaker 3 00:18:56 So the water in the tires.
Speaker 0 00:19:01 Oh, wow. Right. So think about that. I mean, of course these insects are coming around brew this kind of trade, or, you know, they were brought in in order to control one insect, but they also are a problem, you know? So there's a lot of that. And I would say, you know, often we think that they come from Europe or they come from Asia and they come to the United States, but we also send them to Asia and Africa and Europe, we just sent an insect to Africa called the fall army worm. It's always been a problem in U S and central and south America, but never in the old world seems like because of global trade, it might end up in Africa and now it's spread throughout Africa and it's spreading to Asia. So that's my answer to your question. It's not about genetic engineering, but it is definitely about global.
Speaker 3 00:19:52 That totally makes sense to me. I know that's not a new thing because I like birds and I like the black cat chickeny, which is a much prettier bird than the English Barrow. But you don't see the black cap chickadee as much as the common English Sparrow. And then from what I understand, the black cap chickadee is native to north America and the English Sparrow was brought over on boats. Right. Is that,
Speaker 0 00:20:23 Yeah. Well, I don't know what up the era, but that was a long time ago, but I mean, honeybees are not native either. Right? So they were brought over for hunting production and you may know the gypsy moth defoliates trees and stuff. Somebody brought that over because they were experimenting with something to replace silkworms, right. They were going to try to start a industry and then some of escape, that person felt very badly.
Speaker 3 00:20:49 So this is not new. This
Speaker 0 00:20:51 Is not new. But I think I would say probably that the rate has gone up because of all the global.
Speaker 3 00:20:59 So it's not something that should be ignored. There are problems resolving, right.
Speaker 0 00:21:04 And of course the U S does things, you know, at its ports and stuff and has a whole group of people from the USDA that inspect cargos coming in. But think about all that's coming in. It's so hard to keep track on this.
Speaker 3 00:21:18 It would be unrealistic to think that nothing is going to get through. So tell me if this is realistic, I have a vision of this world where every crop and everything were just a hundred percent organic and that that's the direction that we go with. Everything that we don't use pesticides and that everything is organic. Is that crazy? I mean, is that even possible? Why wouldn't we want to do that? Help me understand that. Okay.
Speaker 0 00:21:46 Okay. So people have differing opinions about this, and some people point to the idea that organic agriculture wouldn't be as productive and we'd need to use more acres. So we'd have to cut down more trees and grow more in order to do that. But the other thing I'd want to get back to is think of what do you mean when you say organic, right. We have organic standards. You can only put that label on your produce if it's organic
Speaker 3 00:22:14 That's standard.
Speaker 0 00:22:15 Yeah. So that's the standard and that standard means it can't be genetically engineered that's out. Right. But it doesn't eliminate all pesticides. It eliminates all synthetic pesticides. So there are pesticides that can be used by organic farmers and they use them a lot that are derived from actual other organisms. So there's a group of compounds called spinosa or whatever that are used, you know, so basically people spray in organic farm and kill insects using that, but it's just a different way. So I just want to make clear, you know, what organic means, but I mean, there are real advantages. I mean, you know, we, you look at nitrogen runoff from conventional plantings and yeah. If you can improve that. So I would say, you know, what organic has captured, people's understanding, you know, like that's, you know, everybody sees organic is going to be healthier, but there's also sort of ecological agriculture or agroecology, which is more focused on not so much the idea of, is it an organic pesticide or is it a different best side, but just to decrease the use of those things and to make it more ecologically sustainable.
Speaker 0 00:23:36 But I don't think that has the panache that organic has, you know, people don't go to the grocery store looking for ecologically sustainable, but I was in Moscow, Idaho, and there's a grocery store that says, you know, basically they rate their produce based on six different factors. And some of them are how locally grown it is. And other things like that, you know, and how, how long the person has been cultivating in that one area to increase the richness of the soil. We can't all do that, but it is useful. We had the new secretary of agriculture coming in and he came down to my university, NC state with the USDA to have a conference on coexistence of genetically engineered agriculture and non genetically engineering agriculture. Right? So the problem is that genes from the genetically engineered crops will get into the conventional crop or that somebody who sprays their crop with glyphosate, right.
Speaker 0 00:24:40 Which is, this is Roundup, genetically engineered plants can tolerate that, but the others don't, you know, so well, if farmers are near each other, right, it's going to drift and it's going to cause problems. So, you know, Tom, Vilsack very big person, right. Major player. And it was so interesting because there are all these people who want to fight. And he started the conference saying, I don't want to talk about science. You know, I don't want you to prove that your science is better than their science. I want to come up with a diverse and flourishing agriculture in the United States. And he was saying to me, that flourishing would be to have diversity and to allow people to choose the kind of food they want. We don't tell people that they can't buy a Mercedes-Benz or they can't buy this or that give them the choice of foods.
Speaker 0 00:25:32 Let's make it work as effectively as possible. I thought, wow. So I'm glad to have him back. Not everybody might be, but it's sort of an attitude of, we all like to have choice. So you're going to have choice some of the choices you make, maybe stupid, you know, and that are more expensive, but it depends on, you know, if you feel good, if you like it, right. I think that that's an important piece. So I'll take that to his kind of thing. And the fact that we have now have a law, a federal law about labeling foods, right. That are genetically engineered. And when we did that report in 2016, our committee said, you know, we found no substantiated evidence that these foods would be bad for your health and the USDA. And the FDA has a mandate that they don't mark any foods with a warning.
Speaker 0 00:26:26 You know, like they have an allergy warning on some things, right? Well, that makes sense, right? Because they could be allergenic and there's data on it. So they can label that, but they can't label something. If there's not a utility to that information in terms of people's health. So for years, the FDA was arguing, wait, we're not going to label this stuff because it's not dangerous. So the FDA can't regulate that. But when we were doing this, we said to the FDA, you say that, but we break down on every little ingredient thing. If it was natural color or artificial color, or if it was, you know, artificial flavor, natural, right. Or artificial flavors dangerous. And I didn't know this, they said to me, well, that wasn't us. That was Congress. People were worried about these artificial ingredients. So Congress said, you got to label it.
Speaker 0 00:27:20 And Congress also said, you know, what, if fruit comes from Mexico, you got to label where it comes from. I love it. Right? Because when I get a cantaloupe from Guatemala, I know it came from Guatemala. I like to think about it, but I mean, it's not good for the environment, but we know where our food comes from because apparently Congress said that it's not that fruit coming from Guatemala is not safe. So the FDA wasn't in charge of saying label that it was a more of a congressional time thing in response to consumers, people wanting to know or whatever it was somehow or other, or politicians wanting to think that, oh, well, maybe they'll buy American. You know, I don't, I don't know, honestly, I don't really know, but it wasn't FDA saying don't trust it. If it comes from Guatemala. And of course there is profit in all of this, as you said, companies really felt this would really impact them.
Speaker 0 00:28:14 Right. If they didn't label, they couldn't sell in Vermont. This led to this big turmoil. And they came up with a federal regulation that they will label. But of course they were able to put this off for ever and ever and ever, but now it's coming due. And if you go to the grocery store, you'll see more and more things that are labeled. I do see that. So there is that GMO-free kind of labeling, but there is now appearing required labeling. So in the next couple of years, you will see, but it doesn't say that it's genetically engineered, it's called something like bio engineered or they were going to have a little label that had a fancy little sun on it. Right. Natural. Yeah. Anyway, you know, I mean all to say that these things are coming and you will be able to see them.
Speaker 0 00:29:06 But some of it is really funny because I was just in the grocery store buying cereal. And if you look at Cheerios and of course made of whole grain oats, right, good for your heart and all that kind of thing. Well, if you look on the box of those, at least in supermarkets in North Carolina, it says no GMOs. But if you look at the other Cheerios, now that they had some are chocolate and somewhere, this, that the other and the code, well, they actually have a label on it and says, this contains some genetically engineered ingredients or bio-engineered ingredients. And so why is that is because the regular old Cheerio's are made out of oats and there are no genetically engineered oats in the United States or anywhere else. So that label is true, but it's kind of like,
Speaker 3 00:29:59 They didn't have to do anything special that put the label on,
Speaker 0 00:30:03 Right? It's like when you buy water and it says, no fat, right? Fat
Speaker 3 00:30:06 Free,
Speaker 0 00:30:08 You got it, you got it. But you'll see that they used to have the label GMO-free on the regular Cheerios. They didn't have the label of contains bio-engineered ingredients on the other ones, but that's moving in that direction. So you'll see that Campbell's soups and all of those things will start mentioning that.
Speaker 3 00:30:28 So we'll start seeing those labels and people will make decisions. It will become clear whether people care about this, right. Whether they care, if there's genetically engineered ingredients in the food that they buy, it'll be interesting. I'm really interested in seeing how that plays,
Speaker 0 00:30:48 Right? Yeah. Like how many people look at labels and how much does it matter? Yeah. It'll be interesting to see, you know, the first company that ever came out with genetically engineered product was the flavor savor tomato. They engineered tomato. So it would stay on the shelf longer that it wouldn't go bad. The problem was, there was a bunch of genetic engineers who engineered this into a terrible tasting tomato.
Speaker 3 00:31:14 It was just bad.
Speaker 0 00:31:17 So whatever it was, but they put the label on it. They wanted everybody to know that, that new and improved. Right. So recently you can go to the website, look for pink pineapple, no way. And it's made by, I think Del Monte and it's genetically engineered to be pink. And it is now being sold as a genetically engineered pineapple. How much do you pay for a pineapple in the store? I
Speaker 3 00:31:46 Go to Costco,
Speaker 0 00:31:49 Right? Well, these pink pineapples cost $49.
Speaker 3 00:31:54 You know what? Those are used for $50 drinks cocktail.
Speaker 0 00:32:02 Well, actually one of our graduate students bought one of these. He's very excited about genetic engineering.
Speaker 3 00:32:08 That is funny. Yeah. I'm going to have to look that up. You have been generous with your time and experience and thank you so much.
Speaker 2 00:32:24 Thank you for listening to this episode of GMO watch. If you love the episode, head over to apple podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. This helps other listeners know what you think about our show and they'll share GMO watch with more people like you as reviews come in, I'll read them and give you a shout out. So make sure you add your Instagram handle to your review. I'll see you next week.
