Scientists and self-deception

Nature magazine op-ed on weeds

http://www.nature.com/news/a-growing-problem-1.15382?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20140612

NATURE | EDITORIAL, 11 June 2014  

A growing problem

Without careful stewardship, genetically engineered crops will do little to stop the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds.


EXCERPTS:

Palmer pigweed (Amaranthus palmeri) is not a weed to trifle with. It can reach more than 2.5 metres tall, grow more than 6 centi­metres a day, produce 600,000 seeds and has a tough, woody stem that can wreck farm equipment that tries to uproot it.

It is also becoming more and more resistant to the popular herbicide glyphosate.

The first such resistant population was confirmed in 2005 in a cotton field in Georgia, and the plant now plagues farmers in at least 23 US states. 

There is broad agreement that the spread of these resistant plants has its roots in the widespread adoption of crops engineered to be resistant to glyphosate.

By 2012, glyphosate-resistant weeds had infested 25 million hectares of US cropland. They have also appeared in other countries that have embraced glyphosate-tolerant crops, including Australia, Brazil and Argentina. Blanketing crops year after year in the same herbicide is the perfect way to foster resistant weeds.

Chemical companies have come up with a solution: crops engineered to tolerate multiple herbicides. The likelihood of a weed becoming resistant to more than one chemical, they claim, is very small. And, in an eerie echo of the 1990s discussion around glyphosate tolerance, some even point out that one of the other herbicides being targeted — the choline salt of an old chemical called 2,4-D — has been used for decades with little sign of resistance.

It is a flawed argument. Stacking up tolerance traits may delay the appearance of resistant weeds, but probably not for long. Weeds are wily: farmers have already reported some plants that are resistant to more than five herbicides. And with glyphosate-resistant weeds already in many fields, the chances of preventing resistance to another are dropping.

Nature on the Seralini retraction

http://www.nature.com/news/study-linking-gm-maize-to-rat-tumours-is-retracted-1.14268

Study linking GM maize to rat tumours is retracted

Publisher withdraws paper despite authors' objections, citing weak evidence.

• Barbara Casassus

28 November 2013

Gilles-Eric Séralini was the lead author of a study, now withdrawn by the publisher, that purportedly showed that genetically modified maize causes tumours in rats.

CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

Nature is at it again

http://www.nature.com/news/transgenics-a-new-breed-1.12887

Transgenics: A new breed

The next wave of genetically modified crops is making its way to market — and might just ease concerns over 'Frankenfoods'.

• Daniel Cressey

01 May 2013

IMAGE: SERGE BLOCH

GM crop use makes minor pests major problem

Pesticide use rising as Chinese farmers fight insects thriving on transgenic crop

Jane Qiu

Mirid bugs have filled the gap created by killing other pests of cotton.Science/AAAS

Growing cotton that has been genetically modified to poison its main pest can lead to a boom in the numbers of other insects, a ten-year study in northern China has found.

In 1997, the Chinese government approved the commercial cultivation of cotton plants genetically modified to produce a toxin from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that is deadly to the bollworm Helicoverpa armigera. Outbreaks of larvae of the cotton bollworm moth in the early 1990s had hit crop yields and profits, and the pesticides used to control the bollworm damaged the environment and caused thousands of deaths from poisoning each year.

More than 4 million hectares of Bt cotton are now grown in China. Since the crop was approved, a team led by Kongming Wu, an entomologist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, has monitored pest populations at 38 locations in northern China, covering 3 million hectares of cotton and 26 million hectares of various other crops.

Numbers of mirid bugs (insects of the Miridae family), previously only minor pests in northern China, have increased 12-fold since 1997, they found. "Mirids are now a main pest in the region," says Wu. "Their rise in abundance is associated with the scale of Bt cotton cultivation."

Wu and his colleagues suspect that mirid populations increased because less broad-spectrum pesticide was used following the introduction of Bt cotton. "Mirids are not susceptible to the Bt Science¹. toxin, so they started to thrive when farmers used less pesticide," says Wu. The study is published in this week's issue of

"Mirids can reduce cotton yields just as much as bollworms, up to 50% when not controlled," Wu adds. The insects are also emerging as a threat to crops such as green beans, cereals, vegetables and various fruits.

Interview with Roger Beachy, Obama's pick to head the Natl Inst of Food & Ag

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v28/n1/full/nbt0110-11.html

Plant scientist Roger Beachy has joined the Obama administration to lead the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the new research funding arm of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Beachy, whose research led to the first transgenic crop, was previously the long-time head of the not-for-profit Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. Emily Waltz talks to Beachy about his plans for the new agency.

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Do you think that the financial support from Monsanto at the Donald Danforth Plant ScienceCenter will affect how you form relationships with industry at NIFA?

No. As president of the Danforth Center I encouraged relationships with private companies, including Monsanto. But it should be understood that those relationships did not result in significant influences over the mission of the Center. It's unfortunate that some people think that that relationship has tainted me in some way, although I guess it's not unexpected.

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Why do we see such an emphasis on transgenic strains of major crops rather than other crops that would benefit small-scale farmers and consumers?

There is relatively little profit in minor crops like blueberries and sweet potatoes compared with the large commodity crops. So the major seed companies aren't very interested in developing them; that is left to the public sector and small seed companies. And while public sector science is putting a lot of effort into researching these smaller crops, the cost of navigating the regulatory process is so high that it essentially eliminates public sector participation in commercialization. Noncommercial researchers also lack the expertise and infrastructure to provide regulatory authorities with the necessary documentation for regulatory approval. Without additional support, there will likely be few genetically enhanced crops developed by public sector researchers in the marketplace in the near future.

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Will NIFA fund research that examines the potential risks of biotech crops?

We've had more than 15 years of successful deployment of biotech crops. That history alone tells us a lot about how safe transgenes are under current regulatory guidelines. I think it's important that we stop talking only about risks and talk more about risk-benefit analyses.

Nature editorial on synthetic biology

Ten years of synergy

Contributions to and from basic science are the part of synthetic biology that most deserves celebration.

It was an eclectic crowd of engineers, chemists, computer scientists — and, yes, a few biologists too — that gathered in Irvine, California, in November for the US National Academies Keck Futures Initiative discussion on the future needs of 'synthetic biology'. Their very definitions of the field were correspondingly divergent. But when pressed to focus on concrete examples, most discussion groups, at one point or another, pointed to a defining pair of experiments in tailored gene regulation that were published on 20 January 2000: the first synthetic biological oscillator — the 'repressilator' (M. B. Elowitz and S. Leibler Nature 403, 335–338; 2000) — and a bistable gene-regulatory network, or 'toggle switch' (T. S. Gardner et al. Nature 403, 339–342; 2000). So those in the field may not agree on what it is, but they seem to know when it started.

Since then there have been ten years of vibrant interdisciplinary science, and much public discussion both in policy circles and in the media. No such fame could have been predicted at the outset. 'Synthetic biology' was not a common phrase, and many considered the gadgets merely practical extensions of genetic engineering at best, or irrelevant tricks at worst.

Both of those pioneering experiments transposed two great traditions of physics to biology: first, to understand something one must build it, and second, start from the simplest imaginable principles. These directives have set the basic-science agenda for synthetic biology: to design, and thus define, the minimal systems sufficient to produce a given function. As this multidisciplinary field grew, practitioners envisaged bolder applications, such as building collections of interchangeable parts and devices, and transforming microorganisms into factories for biofuels or drugs.

Bringing these applications to reality has proved much harder than was originally hoped (see page 288). But the difficulties have proved instructive. Indeed, the decade-old papers raised several new and fundamental issues in biology, for example by pointing to the crucial role of noise in gene expression, both as a nuisance and as a great computational opportunity. It is now an active area of research.

More importantly, the difficulties encountered when building such basic circuits announced the demise of intuition as a reliable guide to biological understanding. It took endeavours in synthetic biology to illustrate what systems biology perhaps should mean: to enlist mathematical formalism in producing biological insights that are beyond the reach of mere intuition. In that aspect, synthetic and systems biology now seem indissociable, a theme illustrated by the selection of 'synthetic systems biology' papers published in Nature over the past ten years, and gathered in this week's web focus (http://go.nature.com/Dq38zq).

Undoubtedly some strands of synthetic biology are media friendly and run the risk of hype. But it is not an overstatement to say that the potential of synthetic biology remains enormous: clean and sustainable biofuels, cheap drug production and synthetic organs are just a few of the applications that have been advanced, albeit through small, painfully incremental steps, in the past decade. Full realization of such elating prospects demands patience as well as the efforts and ingenuity of a rich diversity of biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers.

New gadgets will not be the only outcome. One goal of synthetic biology is to synthesize larger and more complex biological systems, as exemplified by the quorum of genetic clocks displayed by Tal Danino et al. in this issue (see page 326). As it develops along this and other paths, synthetic biology itself will demand more by way of new fundamental biological knowledge — quantitative, systematic, computational and biophysical. And conversely, one of the deepest lessons from these first ten years is that biological knowledge will require synthetic approaches if it is to become a mature and reasonably predictive science.

SOURCE:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463269b.html

Five hard truths for synthetic biology

Can engineering approaches tame the complexity of living systems? Roberta Kwok explores five challenges for the field and how they might be resolved.

Roberta Kwok

Download a PDF of this story

To read some accounts of synthetic biology, the ability to manipulate life seems restricted only by the imagination. Researchers might soon program cells to produce vast quantities of biofuel from renewable sources, or to sense the presence of toxins, or to release precise quantities of insulin as a body needs it — all visions inspired by the idea that biologists can extend genetic engineering to be more like the engineering of any hardware. The formula: characterize the genetic sequences that perform needed functions, the 'parts', combine the parts into devices to achieve more complex functions, then insert the devices into cells. As all life is based on roughly the same genetic code, synthetic biology could provide a toolbox of reusable genetic components — biological versions of transistors and switches — to be plugged into circuits at will.

Such analogies don't capture the daunting knowledge gap when it comes to how life works, however. "There are very few molecular operations that you understand in the way that you understand a wrench or a screwdriver or a transistor," says Rob Carlson, a principal at the engineering, consulting and design company Biodesic in Seattle, Washington. And the difficulties multiply as the networks get larger, limiting the ability to design more complex systems. A 2009 review¹ showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out.

Challenges loom at every step in the process, from the characterization of parts to the design and construction of systems. "There's a lot of biology that gets in the way of the engineering," says Christina Agapakis, a graduate student doing synthetic-biology research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. But difficult biology is not enough to deter the field's practitioners, who are already addressing the five key challenges.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463288a.html

Some of the comments generated by Emily Waltz's Nature article

It was with surprise that I read Emily Waltz 's article "Battlefield". Waltz used the word "attack" four times in the article yet never once put forward evidence of anything other than challenges to the science methodology, interpretation, incomplete citations, over reaching conclusions etc. Attempting to claim victim status is a very successful method used to avoid the real issue, in this case the BAD Science. I was left wondering if the intent of the article was to quiet the scientific criticisms. As far as I can determine the scientific criticisms were right on the mark. It is too bad Emily Waltz and Nature did not appear to understand this point. When poor quality science goes unchallenged we all lose.

Robert Wager
Vancouver Island University
Nanaimo BC
Canada
robert.wager@viu.ca

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The critics' claim that EU regulation on GMOs is "fuelled by bad science and ideological opposition" betrays the critics' own ideological position and scientific hubris. Quite a few peer-reviewed papers have been publiched in peer-reviewed journals, based on rigorous methodlogy and long-term field data, which unamiguously show adverse impacts of GM crops on biodiversity (for example, Bohan et al. 2005, Proc. Royal Soc. B 272, 463–474). Critics who are so earnest about "good science" are surprisingly silent about such publications. They never write letters to policy makers suggesting immediate ban of herbicide tolerant GM crops in all countries.
Similarly, Saxena's work on the significant larvicidal effect of Bt-root exudates from Bt corn hybrids, representing three transformation events (Bt11, MON810, and 176) and evaluated in both in vitro and field studies (Saxena D., S. Flores, and G. Stotzky 2002, Soil Biology & Biochemistry 34, 133-137) is neither cited nor noticed by these self-righteous critiques. A number of excellent studies (cited in Séralini et al. (2009, Int. J. Biol. Sci. 5: 438-443) are fated to disappear from the view of policy makers and the public through the "conspiracy of silence".
Contrariwise, when a truly bad paper, reporting absurd findings, was published in a reputed journal like Science, the responsibility and righteosuness of these same critiques, like the Pharaoh's horses behind Moses, sank into the deep sea. This particular study (Qaim, M., & Zilberman, D. 2003, Science 299, 900-902) found up to 83% yield increase in Bt cotton, based on farmer interviews and "trial records" supplied by Mahyco-Monsanto – the company who conducted those putative trials, and obviously had stake in such publications. Moreover, the study did not consider the confounding effects of late (by 2 months) sowing of the crop, and of better water supply to the Bt-cotton fields compared to the non-Bt varieties. When GM crops are promoted at the expense of scientific rigor and sensibility, the whistle blowers cannot find their whistles, or else are out of their breath to blow the whistles.
What surprises me most is the critics' evasion of the fact that Bt toxin is a known insecticide, and biotechnologists have chosen this toxin for incorporation into crop plant precisely for that purpose. However, whenever a study shows a toxic effect on non-target insects, it is immediately branded as "bad science". It requires little understanding of insect physiology to surmise that continuous flux of the insecticidal toxin from a Bt-plant source into the soil and run-off water is likely to eliminate at least some non-target insects. One may argue about the exact extent of mortality of this or that species, but the lethal effect of Bt toxin on non-target insects is well established (see Hilbeck, A. and J.E.U. Schmidt 2006, Biopestic. Int. 2 (1): 1-50). The effect is certain when insect predators and parasitoids consume "Bt-susceptible and sublethally-damaged herbivores" (J., M. Meissle & F. Bigler 2006, Nature Biotechnology 24: 63 – 71). Do the critics perceive any policy implication of these findings?

Debal Deb
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Barrackpore, India. (Current address: Energy & Resources Group, Uinviersity of California- Berkeley)
debaldeb@wildmail.com

Nature article on pro-GMO scientists' bullying

Papers suggesting that biotech crops might harm the environment attract a hail of abuse from other scientists. Emily Waltz asks if the critics fight fair.

Emily Waltz

Download a PDF of this story

LINK: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090902/full/461027a.html

Deserting the hungry? Nature editorial

http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8684

EXTRACT: The idea that biotechnology cannot by itself reduce hunger and poverty is mainstream opinion among agricultural scientists and policy-makers. For example, biotechnology expansion was not among the seven main recommendations in Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done, a report commissioned by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. The writing team for this report included Kenya's Florence Wambugu, perhaps the strongest proponent for biotechnology in Africa.

Nature's genetically modified editorial

http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=8614

Nature's genetically modified editorial (17/12/2007)

NOTE: Over the weekend a scientist contacted us to say his dream had always been to have a paper published in Nature, but that had changed after seeing the Nature editorial attacking Dimas and the treatment of Dr. Ermakova by Nature Biotechnology.

Another scientist, whose research has been published in Nature, told us, 'Nature is now doing as much harm to science as Science or the Proceedings of the Natl Academy, who have done nothing but become political outlets for the new owners of our societies, the corporations. In doing so, they have turned the lights out on real critical thinking, and alienated the public away from science - people are not stupid, and it does not take much to see how corrupt the house of Science has become. It is sad to see Nature in such a sorry state.'