COMPANIES eager to genetically engineer food plants to contain vaccines, drugs and industrial chemicals have been shaken to their roots by last week’s disclosure that “pharmed” crops have twice contaminated fields of soybeans.
The revelation has prompted a wave of criticism from both friends and foes of the agricultural biotech industry, and calls for more safeguards to prevent drug-laced crops landing on the dinner table.
The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration announced that they had found GM corn containing a pharmaceutical protein growing in two soybean plots in Iowa and Nebraska this autumn. The GM corn had germinated from seeds left over from corn planted the year before by Texas-based company ProdiGene. The firm should have removed these plants under its government permit.
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“This is a failure at an elementary level,” says Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. “They couldn’t distinguish corn from soybeans and remove them from a field. That’s like failing nursery school.” The union and other GM watchdogs had previously warned that the US government rules for growing pharmed crops were far too lax (91av, 6 July, p 4).
What genes the corn contains is a company secret, and ProdiGene couldn’t supply a comment before 91av went to press. But the company’s website says its plants produce vaccines and human therapeutic proteins. To prevent the altered corn or any of its genes spreading, the US government has ordered the burning of 155 acres of surrounding corn and the quarantine of half a million bushels of soybeans harvested with the GM corn, an estimated loss to the company of nearly $3 million. ProdiGene also faces fines of up to $500,000.
Even long-time advocates of plant biotechnology are worried. Before the ProdiGene investigation, politically influential food-industry groups, such as the Grocery Manufacturers of America, were quietly suggesting drugs should only be grown in non-food crops to avoid contamination. Now they are speaking up. “Incidents like these can have ripple effects,” says GMA spokesperson Stephanie Childs. “We don’t want to lose international markets because we can’t assure the safety and integrity of the food supply.”
USDA spokesperson Ed Curlett says his agency will learn from the incident and decide whether rules need to be tightened. “But the system seems to have worked,” he says. “We caught this crop before it entered the animal or human food chain.”
But Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Riverside, says the government was also lucky. “What if the GM corn had come up inside a corn field?” he asks. “It could have cross pollinated and you’d have no idea where it was.”
