Tom Jacobs, a University graduate student, demonstrates various plants in Wayne Parrott’s lab located in the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics. The lab focuses on several genetic engineering projects. Photo by Sean Taylor

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series about genetically modified organism research at the University. Part two will continue next week with legislation concerning GMOs. We begin with part one and the questions surrounding the GMO debate.

Some call it frankenfood. Others call it playing God. But at the core of the matter, genetically modified food and crops are at the center of a debate between government, science and humanity.

“You get a variety of plant that says ‘new and improved’ — we’re the people who make new and improved plants,” said Wayne Parrott, a professor in the crop and soil sciences department. “From an academic perspective, a [genetically modified organism] is any of the plants that have been new and improved over the past century or so. From a sort of popular perception and media perception, a GMO is a plant that has become new and improved not by traditional methods but by splicing a new gene into it.”

There is a fine line between traditional breeding and gene splicing technology, Parrott said.

“Traditional breeding is normally within a species,” he said. “You find one tomato that you like but maybe it’s not sweet enough … you find one that’s sweet enough and you cross the two together so that in the progeny you’re going to find one that has everything you had before but you brought in the extra sweetness.”

Parrott said there are a variety of traits that can be bred into new plants via traditional crossbreeding — mating two different types of an organism — including color, maturity date and insect resistance. However, traditional breeding methods are useless when a desired trait is not found in the plant species at all.

“If the trait is not in the tomato, we’ve got to go elsewhere to get the trait. And that’s where gene splicing comes into play,” Parrott said, adding “elsewhere” could include a microbe, bacterium or virus. “You just take the one gene out of the bacterium … and you splice that gene into the tomato.”

Gene splicing is the process of removing a gene from one species and inserting it into another. There are two common ways to perform a gene splice, both of which involve work at a single-cell level, Parrott said. The first way is to literally shoot the gene into a cell. The second involves using a bacterium that causes galls, or abnormal growths, on plants.

“[The bacterium] naturally got the ability to transfer its own DNA into plants,” Parrott said. “We stick the gene into the bacterium DNA and then when it tries to form a gall in the plant, it sticks in the DNA that we added.”

Parrott’s lab, located in the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics, focuses on several different genetic engineering projects, most of them on soybeans. He collaborates occasionally with Michael Adang, a professor in theentomology department, whose research on Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, helped create such genetically modified plants as RoundUp! Ready cotton and soybeans, marketed by Monsanto.

“They’re both very different — I don’t know if you can really compare them,” said Scott Angle, dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, discussing Parrott and Adang. “But they’re both on the forefront of this argument, of ‘are GMO crops something useful or not?’” 

Unanswered questions 

Essentially, Angle said, what the GMO argument boils down to is a deceivingly simple question of risk assessment.

“Herbicides we know have risks associated with them and can quantify those risks, versus a GMO where we can’t generally find any risk,” he said. “The main argument always used against them is ‘you don’t know what you don’t know.’ And that’s true. We can’t study questions that we haven’t asked yet.”

It’s these unasked — and, consequently, unanswered — questions that raises consumers’ skepticism on the subject. One of the main concerns consumers have with GMOs is how they will affect human health, Angle said.

“Basically, there’s no study of the long-term health effects of GMOs,” said Kayla Calhoun, a senior from Colquitt. “We’re basically just a giant science experiment.”

Those who are pro-GMO, including Parrott and Angle, say the blame for public confusion and misinformation lies with both the industry and the media.

Angle said he once hosted an annual GMO symposium with the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA eventually ended the event, which was intended to include the public in the communication surrounding GMOs.

“They decided that this information was too complex and confusing to the public,” Angle said. “And while it is complex, the alternative of doing nothing just allowed the anti-GMO groups to get the upper hand.”

Parrott said much of the information about GMOs disseminated to the public includes studies that were later proven to be erroneous in method or in results.

“There have been incredible amounts of tests done on [GMOs] and they’re as safe as non-GMO foods,” he said. “One out of every 100 studies shows something adverse, and we have to go in and see if there is something adverse because there is something adverse, or if there was something wrong with the study. And thus far, there’s always been something wrong with the study.”

The primary red flags can include the researcher not feeding animals what she said she did, or using small sample sizes.

There are even unanswered questions about the future of GMO research.

“The next wave of our ability to feed people in this world is going to come from GMO crops,” Angle said. “There may be some new traditional plant genetics, but ultimately the answer is growing more food per acre in areas of the world where they don’t have a lot of resources … In third-world countries, GMO crops will be the savior if they have any hope at all.”

Who will develop these new GM crops? 

China, according to Parrott and Angle.

And why not the U.S.?

“They seem to have fewer regulations about research than we do and they have plenty of money,” Angle said.

Parrott called the future of GMOs in the U.S. “very bleak.”

“Right now, Secretary of Agriculture [Tom] Vilsack is going away from science-based regulatory policies … and it’s setting a very bad precedent,” he said. “Once you’ve shown testing, there’s nothing to be gained by repeating the same test 100 times … It has set us back 10 years and they’re sending us back every day that goes by.” 

The question of sustainability 

Angle said a recent debunked study was about the relationship between monarch butterflies and GM crops.

“We looked and the data first showed that we were killing off monarch butterflies, but once the experiment was repeated we found serious mistakes,” he said. “But that study was picked up around the world and people said we shouldn’t use GM crops because we killed off monarch butterflies. But the study wasn’t true.”

Angle said the real unanswered question in terms of sustainability involves microorganisms scientists might not even know exist yet.

“That’s when the questions get more difficult to answer,” he said. 

Calhoun said there are some potential benefits in GMOs, but is unsure whether these outweigh the unknown costs.

“I guess you could argue for environmental benefits, because they use less pesticides and herbicides, but you can do that anyway and not have to have GMO seeds,” she said.

Parrott is a strong proponent of GMOs as a way to sustainable agriculture.

“If you look at biotech crops, they use a lot less water, and we’re limited for water. They use a lot less fuel … they use a lot less insecticides, which has a lot of collateral impacts on the environment,” he said.

He said he believes GMOs and organics can coexist in the agriculture industry.

“In the organics industry, they’re opposing us and I never figured out why because they’re really very compatible technologies,” Parrott said.

According to the National Organic Program, organic farms can have levels of GMOs up to 5 percent of Environmental Protection Agency levels, Parrott said.

“NOP is very clear that non-intentional presence of GMO does not impact your GMO status,” he said. “So the claim that ‘I’m going to get pollen from them and then I’m going to lose my organic certification’ is completely bogus.”

Shannon Lawrence, a 2010 alumna who now serves as the instructional resources project manager for the CTAE Resource Network, may not agree completely with Parrott, but she can see the two types of agriculture meshing.

“I don’t think it’s an either or, I think it should be a blending,” she said. “But I don’t think that people in power are ready to accept organic or accept raw milk or accept things that aren’t going to be money makers.”